Description
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, Patricia 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
Patricia 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).
Reviews
The author's account of their target phenomenon is free from theoretical biases, which makes this book an even finer contribution to the study of (the diachrony of) complex constructions and their components... I am sure this slim contribution will spark great interest (and, hopefully, fruitful debate) among historical linguists and language theorists, and will also be well received by specialists in Ibero Romance languages. * Enrico Torre, Linguist List *
This is a very important book. By carrying out a scrupulous empirical analysis of noun-based constructions in the history of Spanish and Portuguese, the authors provide the linguistic community with a two-fold contribution: on the one hand, they shed new light on the nature of these constructions; on the other hand, they offer new insights on the historical development of the grammar of these two closely related languages. This book will be particularly appealing to language theoreticians as well as specialists in Ibero-American languages [...] I am sure this slim contribution will spark great interest (and, hopefully, fruitful debate) among historical linguists and language theorists, and will also be well-received by specialists in Ibero-Romance languages. * Enrico Torre, Universita degli Studi di Genova *
Book Information
ISBN 9780198847182
Author Patricia Amaral
Format Hardback
Page Count 208
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 458g
Dimensions(mm) 238mm * 160mm * 18mm
About the Author
Patricia 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).
Reviews
The author's account of their target phenomenon is free from theoretical biases, which makes this book an even finer contribution to the study of (the diachrony of) complex constructions and their components... I am sure this slim contribution will spark great interest (and, hopefully, fruitful debate) among historical linguists and language theorists, and will also be well received by specialists in Ibero Romance languages. * Enrico Torre, Linguist List *
This is a very important book. By carrying out a scrupulous empirical analysis of noun-based constructions in the history of Spanish and Portuguese, the authors provide the linguistic community with a two-fold contribution: on the one hand, they shed new light on the nature of these constructions; on the other hand, they offer new insights on the historical development of the grammar of these two closely related languages. This book will be particularly appealing to language theoreticians as well as specialists in Ibero-American languages [...] I am sure this slim contribution will spark great interest (and, hopefully, fruitful debate) among historical linguists and language theorists, and will also be well-received by specialists in Ibero-Romance languages. * Enrico Torre, Universita degli Studi di Genova *
Book Information
ISBN 9780198847182
Author Patricia Amaral
Format Hardback
Page Count 208
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 458g
Dimensions(mm) 238mm * 160mm * 18mm
