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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2013: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' Amsterdam 2013
Edited by Enoch O. Aboh, Jeannette Schaeffer and Petra Sleeman
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 8] 2015
► pp. 239–260

The (non-)grammaticalization of possession in Guatemalan Spanish

| Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main

My study focuses on Guatemalan Spanish and discusses a distinctive morphosyntactic property of it: the possibility of combining a prenominal weak possessive with a, usually indefinite, determiner (as in una mi hermana). On the basis of an empirical evaluation of spontaneous speech data, extracted from the Preseea-Guatemala corpus, I consider the distributional properties of this phenomenon and interpret the results against the background of current grammaticalization theory. In particular, I argue that an indefinitely marked DP can impede the grammaticalization of the possessive adjective.

Published online: 2 December 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.8.13els
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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Elsig, Martin
2017. New insights into an old form: A variationist analysis of the pleonastic possessive in Guatemalan Spanish. Language Variation and Change 29:2 ► pp. 157 ff. DOI logo

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