Auxiliary Selection in Spanish

Gradience, gradualness, and conservation

Author

Malte Rosemeyer | University of Freiburg

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027259202 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027270405 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

Although usage-based linguistics emphasises the need for studies of language change to take frequency effects into account, there is a lack of research that tries to systematically model frequency effects and their relation to diffusion processes in language change. This monograph offers a diachronic study of the change in Spanish perfect auxiliary selection between Old and Early Modern Spanish that led to the gradual replacement of the auxiliary ser ‘be’ with the auxiliary haber ‘have’. It analyses this process in terms of the interaction between gradience, gradualness, and the conserving effects of frequency and persistence in language change. The study contributes to the theory and methodology of diachronic linguistics, additionally offering insights on how to explain synchronic grammatical variation both within a language and between languages. The book is of interest to the fields of Spanish and Romance linguistics, syntax, as well as historical and variationist linguistics.

[Studies in Language Companion Series, 155] 2014. xix, 313 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.155

Table of Contents

Conventions | pp. xiii–xiv

List of tables | pp. xv–xvi

List of figures | pp. xvii–xviii

Acknowledgements | pp. xix–xx

Chapter 1. Introduction | pp. 1–8

Chapter 2. Theoretical prerequisites | pp. 9–38

Chapter 3. A constructional approach to Spanish auxiliary selection | pp. 39–74

Chapter 4. A model of linguistic disappearances | pp. 75–104

Chapter 5. Methodology and corpus | pp. 105–136

Chapter 6. Auxiliary selection in Old Spanish | pp. 137–184

Chapter 7. Gradualness and conservation in the loss of ser + PtcP | pp. 185–262

Chapter 8. Conclusions | pp. 263–276

References | pp. 277–298

Chapter 9. Appendix | pp. 299–308

Index | pp. 309–314

“Combining empirical scrutiny and insightful theoretical discussion, Malte Rosemeyer provides an up-to-date analysis of perfect auxiliary selection in the history of Spanish. He takes into account a wide variety of potential determinants of the choice between HAVE and BE auxiliary forms, and offers a critical assessment of their relative importance and interrelatedness. More generally, this study significantly advances our understanding of the gradualness of morphosyntactic change, and of the role of frequency in diachronic explanation.”

Andreas Dufter, University of Munich

“This is a fascinating exploration of the diachronic change in the auxiliary selection system between Old and Early Modern Spanish. Drawing on work in linguistics, corpus analysis, and statistical modelling, the author presents an account that is not only comprehensive in its coverage of the interacting factors leading to increasing variation in auxiliary choice, but also rigorous in its theoretical reanalysis of this phenomenon. The book is invaluable and inspiring reading for linguists, variationists, and acquisitionists regardless of theoretical orientation.”

Antonella Sorace, The University of Edinburgh

Cited by

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De Smet, Hendrik

2016. How gradual change progresses: The interaction between convention and innovation. Language Variation and Change 28:1 ► pp. 83 ff.

Enrique-Arias, Andrés

2018. Some methodological issues in the corpus-based study of morphosyntactic variation. In Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 85], ► pp. 261 ff.

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2017. On causativedarand its alternatives in the history of Spanish. Folia Linguistica 51:s38-s1 ► pp. 91 ff.

Gillmann, Melitta

2018. Manner of motion and semantic transitivity. In Reorganising Grammatical Variation [Studies in Language Companion Series, 203], ► pp. 231 ff.

Hilpert, Martin & Florent Perek

2015. Meaning change in a petri dish: constructions, semantic vector spaces, and motion charts. Linguistics Vanguard 1:1 ► pp. 339 ff.

HOFF, MARK

2023. The Role of Frequency in Morphosyntactic Variation. In The Handbook of Usage‐Based Linguistics, ► pp. 197 ff.

Hundt, Marianne

2021. “The next Morning I got a Warrant for the Man and his Wife, but he was fled”. In Lost in Change [Studies in Language Companion Series, 218], ► pp. 199 ff.

Jennings, William & Stefan Pfänder

2018. Linguistics: Inheritance and Innovation in French Guianese Creole. In Inheritance and Innovation in a Colonial Language, ► pp. 83 ff.

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2021. A constructional account of the loss of the adverse avertive schema in Mandarin Chinese. In Lost in Change [Studies in Language Companion Series, 218], ► pp. 131 ff.

Lamiroy, Béatrice & Anna Pineda

2017. Grammaticalization across Romance languages and the pace of language change. Lingvisticae Investigationes 40:2 ► pp. 304 ff.

Larsson, Ida

2021. Chapter 12. On the emergence of auxiliary selection in Germanic. In The Perfect Volume [Studies in Language Companion Series, 217], ► pp. 292 ff.

Massanell i Messalles, Mar

2021. Chapter 2. Using linguistic atlases to explore syntactic issues. In Syntactic Geolectal Variation [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 34], ► pp. 35 ff.

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2022. Asyndetic complementation and referential integration in Spanish. Journal of Historical Linguistics 12:2 ► pp. 194 ff.

Mazzola, Giulia, Malte Rosemeyer & Bert Cornillie

2022. Syntactic alternations and socio-stylistic constraints: the case of asyndetic complementation in the history of Spanish. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 8:2 ► pp. 197 ff.

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2019. Large Corpora and Historical Syntax: Consequences for the Study of Morphosyntactic Diffusion in the History of Spanish. Frontiers in Psychology 10

Perek, Florent & Martin Hilpert

2017. A distributional semantic approach to the periodization of change in the productivity of constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22:4 ► pp. 490 ff.

Rastelli, Stefano & Marco Porta

2022. Non-optimal processing of auxiliaries in L2 Italian: An eye-movement and acceptability judgment study. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 41:2 ► pp. 279 ff.

Rosemeyer, Malte

2022. Anteriors and resultatives in Old Spanish. In From Verbal Periphrases to Complex Predicates [IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature, 31], ► pp. 149 ff.

Rosemeyer, Malte & Andrés Enrique-Arias

2016. A match made in heaven: Using parallel corpora and multinomial logistic regression to analyze the expression of possession in Old Spanish. Language Variation and Change 28:3 ► pp. 307 ff.

Van de Velde, Freek & Isabeau De Smet

2022. Markov Models for Multi-state Language Change. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 29:3 ► pp. 314 ff.

Velde, Freek Van de & Alek Keersmaekers

2020. What are the determinants of survival curves of words?. Evolutionary Linguistic Theory 2:2 ► pp. 127 ff.

[no author supplied]

2021. A constructional account of the loss of the adverse avertive schema in Mandarin Chinese. In Lost in Change [Studies in Language Companion Series, 218],

[no author supplied]

2021. “The next Morning I got a Warrant for the Man and his Wife, but he was fled”. In Lost in Change [Studies in Language Companion Series, 218],

[no author supplied]

2023. The Spanish and the Portuguese Present Perfect in Discourse [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 279],

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 september 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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