Article published in:
Portuguese-Spanish Interfaces: Diachrony, synchrony, and contactEdited by Patrícia Amaral and Ana Maria Carvalho
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 1] 2014
► pp. 35–64
Syntactic change in Portuguese and Spanish
Divergent and parallel patterns of linguistic splitting
This chapter describes two cases of divergent syntactic change between Portuguese and Spanish, namely clitic placement and post-nominal algum/alguno. While both changes feature instances of linguistic splitting from a former unity during the Middle Ages, they nevertheless exhibit different patterns of development, illustrating what the author calls the ‘inverted-Y’ and the ‘I’ patterns of change. Under the former, the two languages start diverging as soon as grammatical change is set in motion. Under the latter, the two languages show a similar/parallel path of change and eventually split apart when one of them goes a step further than the other. Clitic placement in the history of Spanish and Portuguese exemplifies the ‘inverted-Y’ pattern, post-nominal algum/alguno exemplifies the ‘I’ pattern of change.
Published online: 30 October 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.1.04mar
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.1.04mar
References
References
Badia Margarit, A.M.
(1947) Los complementos pronominalo-adverbiales derivados de IBI e INDE en la Península Ibérica. Anejos de la Revista de Filología Española, 38.
Barry, A.K.
(1987) Clitic pronoun position in thirteenth-century Spanish. The Hispanic Review, 55, 213–220. 
Batllori, M., Iglésias, N., & Martins, A.M.
(2005) Sintaxi dels clítics pronominal sen el catalã medieval. Caplletra 38, 137–177.
Benincà, P.
(1995) Complement clitics in medieval Romance: The Tobler-Mussafia Law. In A. Battye & I. Roberts (Eds.), Clause structure and language change (pp. 325–344). Oxford: OUP.
Bosque, I.
(1996) La polaridad modal. Actas del Cuarto Congreso de Hispanistas de Asia, 7–14. Seúl: Asociación Asiática de Hispanistas.
Bouzouita, M.
(2008) The diachronic development of Spanish clitic placement. Ph.D. dissertation. King’s College London.
Cardinaletti, A.
(1991) On pronoun movement: The Italian dative loro. Probus, 3(2),127–153.
(1999) Pronouns in Germanic and Romance languages: An overview. In H. van Riemsdijk (Ed.), Clitics in the languages of Europe (pp. 33–82). Berlin: Mouton the Gruyter.
Cardinaletti, A., & Starke, M.
(1996). Deficient pronouns: A view from Germanic: A study in the unified description of Germanic and Romance. In H. Thráinsson, S.D. Epstein, & S. Peter (Eds.), Germanic syntax (pp. 21–65). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Cardinaletti, A.
(1999) The typology of structural deficiency: A case study of the three classes of pronouns. In H. van Riemsdijk (Ed.), Clitics in the languages of Europe (pp. 145–233). Berlin: Mouton the Gruyter.
Castro, I.
(1991) Curso de História da Língua Portuguesa. Lisboa: Universidade Aberta.
(2002) Sur le bilinguisme littéraire castillan-portugais. La littérature d’auteurs portugais en langue castillane: Arquivos do Centro Cultural Português, 40, 11–23.
Chenery, W.H.
(1905) Object-pronouns in dependent clauses: A study in Old Spanish word-order. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 20, 1–151.
Cintra, L.F.L.
(1954) Crónica Geral de Espanha de 1344: Edição crítica do texto português (Vol. 2). Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional- Casa da Moeda.
Corpus do Português: Davies, Mark and Michael Ferreira
(2006) Corpus do Português (45 million words, 1300s–1900s). Available online at www.corpusdoportugues.org
Lisboa, J., Reis Miranda, T.C.P., & Olival, F.
(Eds.) (2002) Gazetas manuscritas da Biblioteca pública de Évora (1729–1731) (Vol. 1). Lisboa: Colibri, CIDEHUS, CHC-UNL.
(Eds.) (2005) Gazetas manuscritas da Biblioteca pública de Évora (1732–1734) (Vol. 2). Lisboa: Colibri, CIDEHUS, CHC-UNL.
(Eds.) (2007) Gazetas manuscritas da Biblioteca pública de Évora (1735–1737) (Vol. 3). Lisboa: CIDEHUS, CHC-UNL. Unpublished.
Couto, D.
(1782) Da Ásia de diogo do couto. Decada setima. Parte primeira. Lisboa: Na Regia Oficina Typografica. (Original work published 1616).
Duarte, L.F.
(1986) Os documentos em Português da chancelaria de D. Afonso III (Edição). Unpublished Master Dissertation. Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa.
Fontana, J.M.
(1993) Phrase structure and the syntax of clitics in the history of Spanish. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania. Available online at http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1183&context=ircs_reports
(1997) On the integration of second position phenomena. In A. van Kemenade & N. Vicent (Eds.), Parameters of morphosyntactic change (pp. 207–249). Cambridge: CUP.
Giannakidou, A.
(1997) The landscape of polarity items. Groningen: Groningen dissertations in Linguistics 18.
Gili Gaya, S.
(1950)
Diego de San Pedro, Obras
. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.
Granberg, R.A.
(1988) Object pronoun position in medieval and early modern Spanish. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. University of California at Los Angeles.
Halpern, A.
(1995) On the placement and morphology of clitics. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Halpern, A., & J. M
. (CSLI 1994) X0 Clitics and Xmax Clitics”. In Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL XII). Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Huber, J.
(1986) Gramática do Português Antigo. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Original work published 1933)
Kaiser, G.
(1992) Zur Grammatik der klitischen Personalpronomina im Französischen und Portugiesischen: Eine synchronische und diachronische Analyse im Rahmen der Prinzipien- und Parameter- theorie. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. Universität Hamburg. Available at http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/kaiser/files/Kaiser1992_Personalpronomina.pdf
(1999) A ordem das palavras e a posição do verbo finito no português antigo. In Actas do congresso internacional organizado por motivo dos vinte anos do Português no ensino superior (pp. 248–259). Budapeste: Departamento de Língua e Literatura Portuguesas da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade Etövös Loránd.
Keniston, H.
(1937) The syntax of Castillian prose: The sixteenth century. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Kok, A.
(1985) La place du pronom personnel régime conjoint en Français: Une étude diachronique. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Kroch, A.
(1989) Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change, 1, 199–244.
(2001) Syntactic change. In M. Baltin & C. Collins (Eds.), Handbook of contemporary syntactic theory (pp. 699–729). Oxford: Blackwell.
Labelle, M., & Hirschbühler, P.
(2002) Changes in clausal organization and the position of clitics in Old French. Paper delivered at VII Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference, Girona.
Lapa, M.R.
(1965) Cantigas d'escarnho e de mal dizer dos cancioneiros medievais galego-portugueses. Vigo: Galaxia.
Martins, A.M.
(1994) Clíticos na história do Português. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa.
(2001) Documentos portugueses do noroeste e da região de Lisboa: Da produção primitiva ao século XVI. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda.
(2002) The loss of IP-scrambling in Portuguese: Clause structure, word order variation and change. In D. Lightfoot (Ed.), Syntactic effects of morphological change (pp. 232–248). Oxford: OUP.
(2005) Clitic placement, VP-ellipsis, and scrambling in Romance. In M. Batllori, M.L. Hernanz, C. Picallo, & F. Roca (Eds.), Grammaticalization and parametric change (pp. 175–193). Oxford: OUP.
(2011a) Clíticos na história do português à luz do teatro vicentino. Estudos de Linguística Galega, 3, 55–83.
(2011b) Scrambling and information focus in old and contemporary Portuguese. Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 10, 1–26.
. (Forthcoming). Negation and NPI composition inside DP. In T. Biberauer & G. Walkden (Eds.) Syntax over time: Lexical, morphological and information-structural interactions. Oxford: OUP.
Menéndez-Pidal, R.
(1919) Documentos lingüísticos de España (Vol. 1): Reino de Castilla. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Históricos.
Menéndez Pidal, R.
(1980) Cantar de mio cid: Texto, gramática y vocabulario (Vol. 3). Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. (Original work published 1946)
Menéndez-Pidal, R.
(1965) Crestomatía del Español medieval. Madrid: Gredos.
Menéndez Pidal, R.
(1978) Primera crónica general de España, editada por Ramón Menéndez Pidal con un estudio actualizador de Diego Catalán (Vol. 1). Madrid: Gredos.
Meyer-Lübke, W.
(1897) Zur Stellung der tonlosen Objektspronomina. Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, 21, 313–334.
Muidine, S.A.
(2000) Os pronomes i e en(de) no português dos séculos XIII a XVI. Unpublished M. A. Dissertation. Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa.
Mussafia, A.
(1886) Una particolarità sintattica della lingua italiana dei primi secoli. In G.I. Ascoli et al. (Ed.), Miscellanea di filologia e linguistica in memoria di Napoleone Caix e ugo Angelo Canello (pp. 255–261). Firenze: LeMonnier.
Nieuwenhuijsen, D.
(2006) Cambios en la colocación de los pronombres átonos. In C. Company Company (Ed.), Sintaxis histórica del español (pp. 1337–1404). México: UNAM & Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Nunes, J.J.
(1932) Cantigas d’amor dos trovadores galego-portugueses. Lisboa: Centro do Livro Brasileiro.
Nunes, I.F.
(Ed.) (2005) A Demanda do Santo Graal: 2ª edição revista. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda.
Pádua, M.P.C.
(1960) A ordem das palavras no português arcaico. Coimbra: Instituto de Estudos Românicos.
Pato, R.A.B.
(Ed.) (1884) Cartas de Afonso de Albuquerque seguidas de documentos que as elucidam (Vol. 1). Lisboa: Academia Real das Sciencias de Lisboa.
Ribeiro, I.
. (1995a
). Evidence for a verb-second phase in Old Portuguese. In A. Battye & I. Roberts (Eds.) Language change and verbal systems (pp. 110–139). Oxford: OUP.
(1995b) A sintaxe da ordem no português arcaico: O efeito V2. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Campinas.
Rivero, M.L.
(1986) La tipología de los pronombres átonos en el español medieval y en el español actual. Anuario de Lingüística Hispánica, 2, 197–220.
(1991) Clitic and NP climbing in Old Spanish. In H. Campos & F. Martínez-Gil (Eds.), Current studies in Spanish linguistics (pp. 241–282). Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.
(1997) On two locations for complement clitic pronouns: Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian and Old Spanish. In A. van Kemenade & N. Vincent (Eds), Parameters of morphosyntactic change (pp. 170–206). Cambridge: CUP.
Roberts, I.
(1993) A formal account of grammaticalisation in the history of Romance futures. Folia Linguistica Historica, 8(1–2), 219–258.
Roberts, I., & Roussou, A.
(1999). Syntactic change: A minimalist approach to grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP.
Silva, R.V.M.
(1989) Estruturas trecentistas: Elementos para uma gramática do Português arcaico. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda.
Teyssier, P.
(1981) Le système des deíctiques spatiaux en portugais aux XIVe, XVe et XVIe siècles. Cahiers de Linguistique Hispanique Médiévale, 6, 5–39. (Reprinted from Études de Littérature et de Linguistique (pp. 161–198). Paris: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian & Centro Cultural Português. 1990.)
(2005) A língua de Gil Vicente. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda.
Tobler, A.
(1875) Review of “J. Le Coultre, De L’ordre des mots dans Chrétien de Troyes”. Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen, Stück, 34, 1057–1082. (Reprinted from Vermischte Beiträge zur Französischen Grammatik V, 1902 & 197. Amsterdam: Rodopi.)
(1889) Pronominales Objekt zu Infinitiv oder Partizipium. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 13, 186–191. (Reprinted from Vermischte Beiträge zur Französischen Grammatik II, 1902 & 1971. Amsterdam: Rodopi.)
Wanner, D.
(1987) The development of Romance clitic pronouns: From Latin to Old Romance. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
(1991) The Tobler-Mussafia law in Old Spanish. In H. Campos & F. Martínez-Gil (Eds.), Current studies in Spanish linguistics (pp. 313–378). Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.
van der Wouden, T.
(1997) Negative Contexts: Collocation, polarity and multiple negation. London: Routledge.