Parece haber un acuerdo general en que para la historia de la lengua española hay dos grandes etapas, el español medieval y el español moderno, bajo el supuesto de que a partir del siglo XVII el español queda conformado tal como actualmente lo conocemos, sin que desde entonces haya sufrido cambios significativos. La propuesta de este trabajo es que el español ha continuado cambiando, de tal manera que el susodicho español moderno debe dividirse en dos períodos: español clásico, hasta el siglo XVII, y español moderno, a partir del siglo XIX. Como argumento presentamos la historia de tres cambios —la evolución de la predicación con verbos causativos emocionales, el desarrollo del valor de futuro de la perífrasis ir a + infinitivo, y la generalización de la construcción duplicada de complemento indirecto—,que apoyan la idea de que el siglo XIX se constituye, efectivamente, en el punto de partida de un tercer período evolutivo.

This article investigates the origins and development of the ergative patterning in Hindi. Following traditional Indo-Aryan scholarship, two evolutions are discerned: (i) the reanalysis of a passive as an ergative construction, and (ii) the development of an ergative case marker ne. Three different hypotheses have been postulated in the literature to account for the latter change, two of which suggest a grammaticalization path: the first argues for a case marker as a possible source, the second points towards a lexical source. The third hypothesis maintains that language contact is involved in the change. We scrutinize all three hypotheses and conclude that the ne-clitic is borrowed from Old Rajasthani and introduced in analogy to other clitics, which were already in use as reinforcers of existing case functions. We argue furthermore that the rise of the ergative marker can only be adequately explained in relation to the constructional change in (i). Drawing on the traditional account which traces the origins of the ergative construction back to a former passive construction through reanalysis, we argue that it was actually this constructional reanalysis that allowed the introduction of an ergative marker in the language.

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