Noun-Based Constructions in the History of Portuguese and Spanish

Patrícia Amaral · Manuel Delicado Cantero

Apr 2022 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

This book explores syntactic and semantic change in three types of construction in Spanish and Portuguese: (i) complex determiner phrases with clausal adjunction (el hecho de, o facto de), (ii) complex prepositions/complementizers and complex connectives (sin embargo de/sem embargo de, so(b) pena de), and (iii) complex predicates containing light verbs (dar consejo/conselho de). While these constructions are syntactically different, they are all clause-taking complex expressions containing a noun followed by the functional preposition de ('of'). This book is the first work to use a systematic comparative corpus study to explore these expressions together; this approach allows individual changes to be distinguished from general changes, as well as emphasizing the chronological clustering of changes that involve complex constructions in both languages. By studying mechanisms of language change and their outcomes in two sister languages, Patrícia Amaral and Manuel Delicado Cantero address questions such as: How do complex constructions evolve? How does the meaning of the noun change when considered in isolation and when compared to the meaning of the whole construction? And how do syntactic categories change over time? This study of two closely-related languages reveals distinct developments occurring in parallel, and provides a crucial test case for theories of language change.

About the author

Patrícia Amaral is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, where she is also affiliated with Linguistics and Cognitive Science. She obtained her PhD from The Ohio State University in 2007 and has held appointments at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Liverpool, and Stanford University. Her current research focuses on syntactic and semantic change in Portuguese and Spanish, and she has also published more broadly in the fields of Romance linguistics, semantics, and experimental pragmatics. She is the co-editor of Portuguese/Spanish Interfaces: Diachrony, Synchrony, and Contact (Benjamins, 2014). Manuel Delicado Cantero is Senior Lecturer in the Spanish program in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the Australian National University. His research areas include Spanish and Romance syntax and historical linguistics, with particular focus on the syntactic evolution of (finite) clauses introduced by prepositions, dialect syntax, and clausal nominalization in Spanish and other Romance languages. He has also published on the teaching and learning of L2 Spanish pronunciation in Australia. He is the author of Prepositional Clauses in Spanish: A Diachronic and Comparative Syntactic Study (De Gruyter, 2013).