Article published In:
Journal of Historical Linguistics: Online-First Articles

The syntactic and semantic promenade of the Spanish absolute construction along the Communicative Continuum

A case of clause linkage in 15th—18th-century translations from Latin

| Katholieke Universiteit LeuvenLeuven | Universidad de SalamancaSalamanca
This paper investigates the diachronically changing syntactic and semantic status of the Spanish Absolute Construction (AC) on the Communicative Continuum (Koch & Oesterreicher 1990 [2011]) in a corpus of 15th- to 18th-century translations from Latin. Previous research has already demonstrated that the 15th-century preclassical Spanish AC evolved from a highly formal past participial Latin calque in the realm of Communicative Distance to an entrenched gerundial absolute in the 18th century, positioned slightly further from the Communicative Distance pole (Del Rey Quesada 2018, 2021, Molenaers 2023). This study highlights that, besides the altering predicate, other characteristics enhanced the AC’s progression along the Continuum, including one syntactic (non-augmentation) and two semantic (non-adverbial, coreferential) factors. By means of clause linkage (Raible 1992, 2001), a development is traced to a syntactically less dense and semantically less complex gerundial AC, which displays a high frequency of the three outlined features. Complementary analyses grounded in a functional-pragmatic theory of subordination (Cristofaro 2003) have revealed a moderate widening of the innovative AC’s clausal status beyond strict subordination. Two language-internal evolutions, the case switch from ablative to nominative in the transition from Latin to Spanish and priming with the gerundial unaugmented free adjunct (FA), are identified as the driving forces behind the Spanish AC’s syntactic and semantic promenade beyond the extremes of Communicative Distance.
Keywords: absolute construction, clause linking technique, syntax, semantics, translations from Latin, (pre)classical and modern Spanish, diachronic linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Setting the scene
  • 2.Corpus and terminology
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Qualitative approach
    • 3.2Statistical approach
  • 4.Raible’s clause linking theory and parameter outline
    • 4.1Syntax
      • 4.1.1Augmentation
    • 4.2Semantics
      • 4.2.1Relation towards the main clause
      • 4.2.2Degree of coreference
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Independent analysis of the three outlined parameters within the gerundial AC
      • 5.1.1Non-augmentation
      • 5.1.2Non-adverbial semantics
      • 5.1.3Coreference
    • 5.2Independent analysis of the three outlined parameters within the past participial AC
    • 5.3Analysis of the parameter of semantic relation
      • 5.3.1Gerundial AC
      • 5.3.2Past participial AC
    • 5.4Analysis of the parameter of semantic coreference
      • 5.4.1Gerundial AC
      • 5.4.2Past participial AC
    • 5.5A functional-pragmatic approach
  • 6.Language-internal evolutions
    • 6.1Syntactic and semantic consequences of the case switch
      • 6.1.1Augmentation and adverbial semantics as a 15th-century solution to restore syntactic clarity
      • 6.1.2Towards higher levels of non-augmentation, non-adverbial semantics and coreference
      • 6.1.3Cross-linguistic comparison: From Indo-European to Latin
    • 6.2Priming and overlap between gerundial unaugmented FAs and gerundial unaugmented ACs
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
  • Texts and translations
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 August 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.23025.mol
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