This study analyses the relationship between four near-synonymous Swedish prepositions, namely angående, beträffande, gällande and rörande, which are used to establish what we call a topic-marking relation, as in statens avtal angående finansieringen 'the agreement of the state regarding the financing'. By focusing on a single, loosely defined genre consisting of the written texts included in the Swedish PAROLE corpus, we address the question of what differences there are among these four prepositions, which intuitively seem highly similar and mutually interchangeable. In order to find out which contextual and grammatical factors might influence the choice of one preposition over the others, two complementary analyses were performed. First, a so-called collostructional analysis (see Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003, Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004 was performed on 791 cases of these prepositions found in the PAROLE corpus. Secondly, the corpus examples were annotated according to ten syntactic and four semantic criteria and a multinomial logistic regression analysis was performed on the annotated data set. The results show some tendencies pointing to differing usage patterns of the four prepositions. Beträffande stands out as the most frequent of them all and is also preferably used when no explicit head element is present, typically in sentence-initial position. Angående prefers words of communication while rörande is used when another topic-marking preposition is also present. On the other hand, neither of the two analyses leads to a clear distinction among the four prepositions, thus pointing to the fact that these topic-marking prepositions indeed constitute a fairly good case of adpositional synonymy, with few distinguishing factors separating one from the other.

Resumen. El objetivo de este estudio es investigar la relación entre tres diferentes variantes de lo que se denomina la construcción encapsuladora (CxE) (Schmid 2000; Rodríguez Espiñeira 2010), es decir, las secuencias N de que-oración completiva, N que-oración completiva y N de + infinitivo. Se contrastan las tres variantes de la construcción en español y portugués con el fin de averiguar si existen diferencias significativas entre ambas lenguas, algo que cabe asumir teniendo en cuenta dos hechos diferenciadores: a) la ausencia del dequeísmo como tal en portugués y, b) la existencia del infinitivo flexionado en portugués. El análisis se basa en dos grandes corpus electrónicos, el Corpus del español (Davies 2002-) y el Corpus do portugués (Davies-Ferreira 2006-) y tiene como marco teórico la Gramática de construcciones (CxG). Así, el punto de partida son las secuencias N de que, N que y N de infinitivo, cuyos usos en las dos lenguas se investigan mediante el análisis colostruccional (Collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch-Gries 2003)). El análisis se concentra específicamente en los diferentes sustantivos que aparecen en la posición de núcleo de la CxE. Las diferencias en la combinatoria léxica de las tres variantes de la CxE se interpretan como indicios de divergencias y semejanzas entre ellas. Palabras clave: Oraciones completivas de sustantivo, análisis colostruccional, análisis contrastivo de español y portugués, de que, infinitivo.AbstRAct. The aim of the present study is to investigate the relationship between three variants of what is referred to as the shell construction (CxE) (Schmid 2000;Rodríguez Espiñeira 2010), that is, the sequences N de que-clause, N que-clause and N de + infinitive. The three alternate constructions in Spanish and Portuguese are contrasted in order to find out whether there are significant differences between the two languages, as can be assumed on the basis of two important pieces of information: a) the absence of dequeísmo in Portuguese; b) the existence of an inflected infinitive

This paper analyzes the development of the abstract noun caso ‘case’ into a conditional marker in Spanish, as in (en) (el) caso (de) que llueva, no saldremos ‘(in) (the) case (of) that it rains, we’ll stay in.’ Building on diachronic corpus data I show that although the development of the conditional sense of caso in what I call the conditional caso construction can, in principle, be considered a textbook example of grammaticalization, in order to account for the formal variation which characterizes the construction as a whole, a construction grammar account might be preferable. Following Traugott & Trousdale (2013) I suggest that the development of the conditional caso construction can be seen as a case of constructionalization and subsequent constructional changes. From the perspective of Spanish caso the two approaches can be seen as complementary, rather than incommensurate, since they both highlight important aspects of the development of a new grammatical construction.

This paper deals with the semantic notion “topic”, understood broadly as the notion of ‘aboutness’ as in “to talk about stars,” and describes its various forms of expression across ten European languages. The aim is to explore and characterise how topic is construed, that is, which underlying conceptualisations are involved in the metaphorical expressions used to refer to this notion. The description is based on ten parallel versions of A. St. Exupéry’s famous novel Le Petit Prince. The analysis highlights the most salient metaphors that are found in European languages and points at some differences in the topic markers used across languages. The most revealing conceptualisation of topic involves what I have called the revolving metaphor, in which the topic is seen as the centre around which our discussion or thoughts revolve, as in my thoughts revolved around her. The paper ends with a tentative discussion of to what degree the different topic metaphors can be considered dead or alive.