Traces of demonstrative grammaticalization in Spanish variable subject
expression
ella ‘she’ vs. él ‘he’
Third person subject pronouns are widely hypothesized to arise from the
grammaticalization of demonstratives. Analysis of variation between
pronominal and unexpressed subjects in 13th–16th century Spanish texts
(N = 1,947) reveals that subjects referring to women
favored pronominal expression and were more sensitive to the syntactic role
of the previous mention. The data distribution shows that feminine referents
were less topical, or more deictically distant: they occurred less
frequently than masculine ones as subjects, and their previous mention was
more likely to have been in non-subject role – a particularly favorable
environment for pronoun ella ‘she’. Thus, as a vestige of
demonstrative origins, variable subject pronoun use could express
topicality. An intermediate stage of demonstrative > pronoun
grammaticalization may be use of the pronoun for unexpected
subjects.
Article outline
- 1.Variation as a window into grammaticalization
- 2.Data
- 3.Operationalizing deictic function and other motivations for the use of
subject pronouns
-
4.Linguistic conditioning of subject pronouns in early Spanish
texts
- 5.The intersection of referent gender and syntactic role of previous
mention
-
6.Conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
Corpus
-
References
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