Beyond its communicative function, language plays a key role in the labelling of things and events of reality, which has significant cognitive effects. Whereas the verb performs an essentially predicative function, the labelling task is carried out by the noun and is the reason why nouns are the essential protagonists in science and doctrinal texts of all ages. This very fact allows us to understand that nominalization is especially abundant in these types of texts. This paper proposes (or “uses”) an historical approach to the increasing extension of the processes of nominalization of verbs and adjectives through a survey of some of the tables of contents of science books from Renaissance times.
This article documents the historical evolution of the causative and inchoative constructions with the put verbs poner and meter in Spanish. The aim of this case study is to determine how both constructions developed out of the more general abstract caused-motion schema. The analysis is based on a large historical corpus, and traces their semantic and morphosyntactic characteristics from the 13th to the 21st century. The empirical observations are accounted for within the grammatical constructionalization framework. By adopting a network approach we argue that four micro-constructions emerged simultaneously, but that their constructionalization process has been completed to a varying extent. Individual differences are traced back to the upwards strength of the core semantics of the nucleus verb, and the sideward impact of other members in the network.
The present paper has as its aim to offer an analysis about the most important auditory verbs in the Spanish language from a historical and cognitive-functional approach. Evidence will be offered that the patterns for semantic development and syntactic functioning shown by auditory verbs are iconically motivated by the physiological particularities of the human ear. It will also be demonstrated, following the hypothesis about classical Greek and Hebrew proposed by Sweetser (1990) and Viejo Sánchez (2004), that the abstract meaning of obedecer [to obey] developed by the Spanish verb escuchar [to listen] finds its cultural motivation in certain recurrent contexts coming from religious language. In short, this research work not only provides new evidence supporting the hypothesis of language corporeization but also supplies data confirming that linguistic change processes are connected to cultural and anthropological aspects.
The main aim of this paper is to analyze the rise of the Spanish verbal periphrases tener de/que + inf and investigate the relevance of analogy and lexical semantics for these changes. We demonstrate that the constructions haber de/que + inf acted as supporting constructions motivating the rise of the synonymous pair tener de/que + inf (De Smet & Fischer 2017). The analogical process between the two constructions was due to the synonymy between the lexical verbs haber and tener expressing possessive meanings.
The assumption that the progress of culture is characterized by an increase in abstract thinking (in terms of the Vygotskyan model of cognitive development) suggests that the proportion of productive metaphor compared to metonymy increases over time. However, a large-scale investigation of metonymical and metaphoric shifts recorded in Buck’s dictionary of Indo-European synonyms does not support that suggestion.
The present paper has as its aim to show the semantic evolution of the form fijo through which it has acquired increasingly pragmatic uses and functions until it became an epistemic marker. Within this grammaticalization process, the cognitive procedures of metaphor and metonymy, as well as the general mechanism of subjectification, explain the semantic change experienced by this unit thanks to its appearance in certain contextual patterns which have conventionalized the epistemic value. Taking de fijo que, de fijo, and a punto fijo/fixo as our reference, the corpus study reveals that the variants of fijo code both the speaker’s epistemic commitment and evidential contents, even though each one of them conceptualizes the scene from a different perspective.
Linguistic theories emphasize either the inner point of view that explains linguistic phenomena starting from universal structures of the human mind, or the outer point of view that relies on the structure of communication. Enaction is a cognitive approach that locates halfway between formal and functional linguistics. This paper shows how the principles of perceptual interchange can help to explain the evolution and the main uses of the Spanish future tense. The current paradigm consists of four forms, voy a amar, amaré, amaría, amare, respectively temporal, modal, past, and rhetoric. Since none of them proceeds from the classic Latin future amabo, it is concluded that they originate in the adjustment of neural networks to the requirements of communication.
The question of how form and meaning interact in processes of change is of particular significance to historical linguists. Most commonly, innovations in meaning are assumed to lead the way, with changes at the formal level following as a consequence. By contrast, the possibility of a formal change being responsible for the emergence of a new meaning is seldom envisaged. The present paper explores these issues in relation to the polysemous Spanish motion verb alcanzar ‘to reach’, which in the course of time developed the new senses ‘to understand’ and ‘to be sufficient’. The diachronic analysis of the two developments brings into view a meaning-to-form change in the first case but suggests a form-to-meaning path in the second case.
This paper examines the claim that when a full verb is grammaticalized and becomes an auxiliary it is subjected to a process of desemanticization or semantic bleaching. For this matter, the Spanish periphrasis parecer + infinitive (‘to seem’) is analysed on the basis of the three semantic-pragmatic tendencies proposed by Traugott (1989). It is shown how in the course of time the original meaning of physical appearance of the periphrasis developed into the current epistemic and evidential meaning, shifting from a concrete to a more abstract meaning. The semantic shift, so it is argued, does not involve a loss of meaning but constitutes a case of generalization, allowing for the use of the periphrasis with all six grammatical persons.
This paper presents a study on discourse particles in the history of the Spanish language. The research focuses on explaining the socio-cultural context which led to the appearance of some particles by means other than those contemplated in the theory of grammaticalization. By monitoring the history of the discourse particle en sustancia we explain how many of the changes undergone in the Spanish language in the plane of textual construction came from above, were taken directly from the medieval Latin of books and inserted into communicative distance texts, subsequently spreading to become standard.
The aim sought with this research is to show the process of grammaticalization experienced by the prepositional locution en vías de, originated in the prepositional phrase en vía de. The study was carried out through work with diachronic and synchronic corpora which provides evidence that the history of the linguistic change occurred in en vías de has a multidimensional nature, since semantic-pragmatic, morphological, syntactic and textual factors linked by the concepts of ‘process,’ ‘progression,’ and ‘development’ interact in it. The analysis shows that four aspects impact directly on the linguistic innovation of en vías de: semantic change, which revolves around the prototypical and marginal meanings of the Latin noun vĭa; the diachronic diffusion of the prepositional locution and the contexts that it selects between the 14th and 21st centuries, which favor the routinization of prototypical collocational structures; the degree of morphological, syntactic and lexical-diatopical fixation; and finally, the texts where the prepositional locution originated and became widespread and the topics they deal with.
A diachronic approach to Phraseology may provide us the key to understand the nature of the phraseological phenomenon, thus contributing to the establishment of the subdiscipline. In this paper, we underline the relation between Phraseology and language change, showing the similarities between Phraseologization and Grammaticalization processes and, subsequently, focusing on their differences. Having explained the general Phraseologization process, we focus on its three sides: the acquisition of structural, semantic and pragmatic fixedness, leading to the synchronic features known as polylexicality and idiomaticity. Having seen the importance of semantic and pragmatic factors in the process, we describe Phraseologization in terms of semantic change, using the Spanish idiom “con pelos y señales” as an example.
Beyond its communicative function, language plays a key role in the labelling of things and events of reality, which has significant cognitive effects. Whereas the verb performs an essentially predicative function, the labelling task is carried out by the noun and is the reason why nouns are the essential protagonists in science and doctrinal texts of all ages. This very fact allows us to understand that nominalization is especially abundant in these types of texts. This paper proposes (or “uses”) an historical approach to the increasing extension of the processes of nominalization of verbs and adjectives through a survey of some of the tables of contents of science books from Renaissance times.
This article documents the historical evolution of the causative and inchoative constructions with the put verbs poner and meter in Spanish. The aim of this case study is to determine how both constructions developed out of the more general abstract caused-motion schema. The analysis is based on a large historical corpus, and traces their semantic and morphosyntactic characteristics from the 13th to the 21st century. The empirical observations are accounted for within the grammatical constructionalization framework. By adopting a network approach we argue that four micro-constructions emerged simultaneously, but that their constructionalization process has been completed to a varying extent. Individual differences are traced back to the upwards strength of the core semantics of the nucleus verb, and the sideward impact of other members in the network.
The present paper has as its aim to offer an analysis about the most important auditory verbs in the Spanish language from a historical and cognitive-functional approach. Evidence will be offered that the patterns for semantic development and syntactic functioning shown by auditory verbs are iconically motivated by the physiological particularities of the human ear. It will also be demonstrated, following the hypothesis about classical Greek and Hebrew proposed by Sweetser (1990) and Viejo Sánchez (2004), that the abstract meaning of obedecer [to obey] developed by the Spanish verb escuchar [to listen] finds its cultural motivation in certain recurrent contexts coming from religious language. In short, this research work not only provides new evidence supporting the hypothesis of language corporeization but also supplies data confirming that linguistic change processes are connected to cultural and anthropological aspects.
The main aim of this paper is to analyze the rise of the Spanish verbal periphrases tener de/que + inf and investigate the relevance of analogy and lexical semantics for these changes. We demonstrate that the constructions haber de/que + inf acted as supporting constructions motivating the rise of the synonymous pair tener de/que + inf (De Smet & Fischer 2017). The analogical process between the two constructions was due to the synonymy between the lexical verbs haber and tener expressing possessive meanings.
The assumption that the progress of culture is characterized by an increase in abstract thinking (in terms of the Vygotskyan model of cognitive development) suggests that the proportion of productive metaphor compared to metonymy increases over time. However, a large-scale investigation of metonymical and metaphoric shifts recorded in Buck’s dictionary of Indo-European synonyms does not support that suggestion.
The present paper has as its aim to show the semantic evolution of the form fijo through which it has acquired increasingly pragmatic uses and functions until it became an epistemic marker. Within this grammaticalization process, the cognitive procedures of metaphor and metonymy, as well as the general mechanism of subjectification, explain the semantic change experienced by this unit thanks to its appearance in certain contextual patterns which have conventionalized the epistemic value. Taking de fijo que, de fijo, and a punto fijo/fixo as our reference, the corpus study reveals that the variants of fijo code both the speaker’s epistemic commitment and evidential contents, even though each one of them conceptualizes the scene from a different perspective.
Linguistic theories emphasize either the inner point of view that explains linguistic phenomena starting from universal structures of the human mind, or the outer point of view that relies on the structure of communication. Enaction is a cognitive approach that locates halfway between formal and functional linguistics. This paper shows how the principles of perceptual interchange can help to explain the evolution and the main uses of the Spanish future tense. The current paradigm consists of four forms, voy a amar, amaré, amaría, amare, respectively temporal, modal, past, and rhetoric. Since none of them proceeds from the classic Latin future amabo, it is concluded that they originate in the adjustment of neural networks to the requirements of communication.
The question of how form and meaning interact in processes of change is of particular significance to historical linguists. Most commonly, innovations in meaning are assumed to lead the way, with changes at the formal level following as a consequence. By contrast, the possibility of a formal change being responsible for the emergence of a new meaning is seldom envisaged. The present paper explores these issues in relation to the polysemous Spanish motion verb alcanzar ‘to reach’, which in the course of time developed the new senses ‘to understand’ and ‘to be sufficient’. The diachronic analysis of the two developments brings into view a meaning-to-form change in the first case but suggests a form-to-meaning path in the second case.
This paper examines the claim that when a full verb is grammaticalized and becomes an auxiliary it is subjected to a process of desemanticization or semantic bleaching. For this matter, the Spanish periphrasis parecer + infinitive (‘to seem’) is analysed on the basis of the three semantic-pragmatic tendencies proposed by Traugott (1989). It is shown how in the course of time the original meaning of physical appearance of the periphrasis developed into the current epistemic and evidential meaning, shifting from a concrete to a more abstract meaning. The semantic shift, so it is argued, does not involve a loss of meaning but constitutes a case of generalization, allowing for the use of the periphrasis with all six grammatical persons.
This paper presents a study on discourse particles in the history of the Spanish language. The research focuses on explaining the socio-cultural context which led to the appearance of some particles by means other than those contemplated in the theory of grammaticalization. By monitoring the history of the discourse particle en sustancia we explain how many of the changes undergone in the Spanish language in the plane of textual construction came from above, were taken directly from the medieval Latin of books and inserted into communicative distance texts, subsequently spreading to become standard.
The aim sought with this research is to show the process of grammaticalization experienced by the prepositional locution en vías de, originated in the prepositional phrase en vía de. The study was carried out through work with diachronic and synchronic corpora which provides evidence that the history of the linguistic change occurred in en vías de has a multidimensional nature, since semantic-pragmatic, morphological, syntactic and textual factors linked by the concepts of ‘process,’ ‘progression,’ and ‘development’ interact in it. The analysis shows that four aspects impact directly on the linguistic innovation of en vías de: semantic change, which revolves around the prototypical and marginal meanings of the Latin noun vĭa; the diachronic diffusion of the prepositional locution and the contexts that it selects between the 14th and 21st centuries, which favor the routinization of prototypical collocational structures; the degree of morphological, syntactic and lexical-diatopical fixation; and finally, the texts where the prepositional locution originated and became widespread and the topics they deal with.
A diachronic approach to Phraseology may provide us the key to understand the nature of the phraseological phenomenon, thus contributing to the establishment of the subdiscipline. In this paper, we underline the relation between Phraseology and language change, showing the similarities between Phraseologization and Grammaticalization processes and, subsequently, focusing on their differences. Having explained the general Phraseologization process, we focus on its three sides: the acquisition of structural, semantic and pragmatic fixedness, leading to the synchronic features known as polylexicality and idiomaticity. Having seen the importance of semantic and pragmatic factors in the process, we describe Phraseologization in terms of semantic change, using the Spanish idiom “con pelos y señales” as an example.