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Article published In:
Diachronica
Vol. 35:2 (2018) ► pp.210–237
Articles / Aufsätze

Changing frequencies in a constructional landscape

The case of two epistemic constructions in Spanish

| Utrecht University

Many studies on Spanish verbal periphrases either discuss the general features of the syntactic category or analyse the semantic and functional differences between specific members of that category. The present paper focusses on one particular periphrasis, parecer “to seem” + infinitive but, at the same time, takes into account a similar, impersonal construction with parecer. Adopting a constructionist, usage-based approach, data are drawn from a large diachronic corpus, which makes it possible to describe the interplay between the two competing constructions and identify different semantic and syntactic contexts that favoured the increase of the periphrasis in the 19th century at the cost of the impersonal construction. More generally, the paper addresses the relevance of studying individual constructions in the context of other semantically and/or formally related constructions, since a change in one particular area of the constructional landscape can have repercussions on other areas as well.

Keywords: periphrasis, impersonal construction, Spanish, construction grammar, frequency, productivity, distinctive collexeme analysis, semantic category
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The periphrasis vs. impersonal construction
  • 3.Diachronic development of the periphrasis and the impersonal construction
    • 3.1Text frequency
    • 3.2Relative frequency
    • 3.3A change in productivity
  • 4.Expansion of the periphrasis
    • 4.1Semantic analysis of infinitives and complement verbs
    • 4.2Grammatical person and increase of frequency
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 12 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.17021.nie
References

Corpora

ADESSE
Base de Datos de Verbos, Alternancias de Diátesis y Esquemas Sintáctico-Semánticos del Español (Universidade de Vigo). [URL] (September 2017.)
CDH
Instituto de Investigación Rafael Lapesa de la Real Academia Española, Corpus del Nuevo Diccionario Histórico. [URL] (September 2017.)
CORDE
Real Academia Española, Banco de datos CORDE. Corpus diacrónico del español. [URL] (February 2017.)
CORPES XXI
Real Academia Española, Banco de datos CORPES XXI. Corpus del Español del Siglo XXI. [URL] (February 2017.)
CREA
Real Academia Española, Banco de datos CREA. Corpus de referencia del español actual. Annotated version. [URL] (February 2017.)
GRADIA
Corpus compiled by the research group GRADIA. http://gradiadiacronia.wix.com/gradia (February 2017.)

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