Sur la base d'un corpus synchronique et diachronique, cette contribution fournira une étude formelle et fonctionnelle du marqueur nominal ye la / ya(n) en créole guyanais, qui n'a jusqu'à présent guère retenu l'attention des chercheurs. Nous démontrerons qu'il est à la fois marqueur défini pluriel, marqueur pluriel facultatif dans les contextes vocatifs et génériques, ainsi que marqueur de pluriel associatif. Notre analyse nous permettra ensuite une comparaison formelle et fonctionnelle des pluralisateurs des créoles français atlantiques et suggérera des pistes pour de futures recherches en synchronie et en diachronie.

Spanish verb-particle constructions such as llamar para atrás ‘call back’ or ir para atrás ‘go back’, which are found among bilingual speakers in the USA, have been attributed either to structural and/or semantic contact with English or to merely language-internal evolutions. In the present contribution, I provide a qualitative corpus study on the role of [V para atrás] in European, Mexican, and US Spanish, combining a constructional framework with cognitive-semantic, variational and pragmatic-functional approaches. The study reveals that [V para atrás] can be considered a constructional idiom situated in the middle range between lexicon and syntax in all three varieties under study. It also shows that [V para atrás] in US Spanish differs from European and Mexican Spanish with regard to its extended combinatorial properties and the degree of meaning extensions from the spatial into the aspectual domain. These findings allow a more nuanced view on the role of language contact and constructional change, since the properties of US Spanish [V para atrás] can be modelled via intra- and interlingual inheritance links in the cognitive network of bilingual speakers.

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¿Esto se echa para atrás? An approach to verb-particle constructions in European Spanish based on a corpus study of [V para atrás] Abstract: This contribution deals with what are called 'verb-particle constructions' in today's Peninsular Spanish. From the perspective of Construction Grammars, verb-particle constructions correspond to constructional idioms, which occupy an intermediate position in the continuum between lexicon and grammar. Until now, the existence of verb-particle constructions in Spanish has been controversial, since this language is mainly considered to feature verb-framed patterns. However, this question has not yet been investigated empirically. On the basis of data from the Corpus del Español del Siglo XXI, this study examines the instantiations of [V para atrás] as candidates for this type of construction. Although these are generally classified as 'non-normative' in the existing literature, they are found in both spoken and written language. Moreover, both the statistical frequency analysis and the semantic and syntactic study reveal a small network of micro-constructions formed by dar/echar/ir/mirar/tirar/volver para atrás. The latter qualify as lexicalized verb-particle constructions which are mainly characterized by their metaphorical use and less by a specific syntactic behaviour. For today's Peninsular Spanish, we thus cannot assume a closed category of verb-particle constructions. Instead, they form a continuum, together with the concrete, spatial uses of [V para atrás], that ranges from more syntactic constructions to phraseological units showing different degrees of entrenchment.