The development of iterative verbal periphrases in Romance
© 2016 by De Gruyter Mouton. This paper compares the diachronic development of tornar(e)+a+infinitive (henceforth abbreviated RETURN+INF) constructions in Spanish, Catalan, and Italian, a topic that especially for Catalan and Italian has not received much attention. I develop and explore the hypothe...
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Veröffentlicht in: | Linguistics 2016, Vol.54 (2), p.235-272 |
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Format: | Artikel |
Sprache: | eng |
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Zusammenfassung: | © 2016 by De Gruyter Mouton. This paper compares the diachronic development of tornar(e)+a+infinitive (henceforth abbreviated RETURN+INF) constructions in Spanish, Catalan, and Italian, a topic that especially for Catalan and Italian has not received much attention. I develop and explore the hypothesis that due to their lexical origin, iterative constructions develop from a restitutive to a repetitive function. A diachronic analysis of a corpus of RETURN+INF tokens from the three languages suggests that the grammaticalization of RETURN+INF constructions can be measured in terms of (a) actionality and (b) restructuring as mirrored in the possibility of clitic climbing. A statistical analysis using generalized linear mixed-effects regression modeling demonstrates an interplay between restructuring and the actionality of the predicates in the development of RETURN+INF constructions: the grammaticalization process affects state, achievement, and accomplishment predicates before activity predicates because activity predicates exclude a restitutive meaning. The paper thus identifies a grammaticalization path for RETURN+INF constructions common to three Romance languages that suggests a link between typological and diachronic observations. At the same time, it identifies differences in the diachronic development of these periphrases between the Ibero-Romance languages and Italian. In addition, it proposes a statistical means of assessing quantitative differences in the degree to which a verbal periphrasis is grammaticalized across related languages. |
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ISSN: | 0024-3949 |