Conative constructions have enjoyed considerable attention over the past decade from a typological perspective. However, the historical development of conativity in individual languages has been largely neglected to date. In this paper, we put forth an exhaustive diachronic analysis of the… read more
It is a well attested fact that possessive verbs spread to different meanings. In many languages, these lexical verbs often lead to auxiliary and semi-auxiliary verbs. This is the case of Lat. habeo, and its Romance descendants, that gave rises to different periphrastic constructions whose… read more
From a typological perspective, the evolution of a verb meaning ‘to go’ as a future tense marker is a common grammaticalization chain. The evolution of an allative verb as a past tense is much less expected, though documented. In modern Spanish, for instance, it exists a past marker formed by a… read more
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… read more
This study seeks to gain a better insight into the origin and expansion of the construction <va a ser que sí/no
> (lit. goes to be that yes/no) in Peninsular Spanish. We argue that this construction derives from the use of the periphrastic future construction <ir a ‘go to’ + inf> in a… read more
In the present paper, we adduce further evidence for the reality of grammatical constructions by focusing on a highly idiosyncratic configuration from Spanish, which we call the reduplicative-topic construction. This construction is a productive syntactic pattern that functions as a “constructional… read more