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Spanish Socio-Historical Linguistics: Isolation and contact
Edited by Whitney Chappell and Bridget Drinka
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 12] 2021
► pp. 49–76

Personal vs. personalized infinitives in Ibero-Romance

Historical origins and contact-induced change

| UNC Chapel Hill

The infinitives of several Romance languages can appear with an overt subject. Languages such as Portuguese and Galician feature inflectional morphology on infinitives with overt subjects – the commonly named personal infinitives, such as (nós) dizermos ‘us to speak’. Other languages, such as Castilian and Asturian, feature overt subjects alongside infinitives with no corresponding agreement morphology on the verb – a structure I call the personalized infinitive, such as nosotros decir ~ decir nosotros ‘us to speak’. Though superficially similar in use, personal and personalized infinitives differ among Ibero-Romance languages in their history and their uses in the modern dialects. In this paper I distinguish both structures, illustrating the morphosyntactic differences between the two. I also argue for the influence of koineization and language contact as impetus for the historical development of these forms in the various languages.

Keywords: Spanish/Castilian, Portuguese, Galician, Asturian, inflected infinitives, infinitives with subjects, historical change, contact, koineization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Defining personal and personalized infinitives in Ibero-Romance
  • 3.Syntax of infinitivals with subjects
    • 3.1Government and control
    • 3.2Licensing and abstract agreement, and coreference with PRO
  • 4.Theories of contact, convergence, and divergence: Koineization in Galician and Asturian
  • 5.History and distribution of personal infinitives: Portuguese and Galician
    • 5.1Creative argument
    • 5.2Analogy argument
    • 5.3Latin imperfect subjunctive argument
    • 5.4Assimilation and dissimilation in Galician: Effects of contact with castilian
  • 6.The history and syntax of personalized infinitives: Castilian and Asturian
    • 6.1Castilian
    • 6.2Asturian
    • 6.3Contact with Castilian and koineization in Asturian
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.12.c03gra
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