Asyndetic complementation and referential integration in Spanish

Abstract

This paper examines a distinctive syntactic feature of (pre)classical Spanish: asyndetic complementation (without complementizer que ‘that’). While many authors regard this construction as a stylistic variant which eventually declined (i.a., Girón 2005), so far no exhaustive morphosyntactic study of the phenomenon has been presented, as previous works either have focused on only one predicate (Blas Arroyo & Porcar Miralles 2016, 2018) or do not contain detailed quantitative data (Pountain 2015). Using evidence from richly annotated corpus data spanning between 1400 and 1799 (GITHE 2015), we adopt the diachronic probabilistic grammar framework (Szmrecsanyi 2013) by means of multifactorial statistical models, to identify the language-internal probabilistic constraints that regulated the que/Ø alternation, and to explore whether their relevance changed diachronically. The results indicate that asyndetic complementation is promoted in the domain of manipulation verbs (e.g., requests and commands) and, more generally, by the semantic and syntactic integration of events (Givón 2001a). Diachronically we observe that some of the effects strengthened over time, suggesting a syntactic specialization process, which might have eventually led to the restricted and marked use of the asyndeton in Modern Spanish.

¿Cómo explicar el cambio lingüístico marginal? Los modelos lingüísticos actuales y el estudio de los marginalia

“…La advertencia debería hacer reflexionar para evitar que la necesidad de obtener resultados estadísticamente significativos vaya a opacar el estudio de fenómenos que quedan por debajo del umbral de la significatividad. No se trata de ninguna prevención contra este tipo de metodología, cuyos frutos son sobradamente conocidos y han permitido medir la profundidad de numerosos cambios (Mazzola 2022;Rosemeyer 2016;Rosemeyer y Garachana 2019); solo aspiramos a señalar la importancia de enfrentarse al estudio del cambio poniendo la lengua en su centro.…”

Pathways of actualization across regional varieties and the real-time dynamics of syntactic change

“…Mixed-effects logistic regression modelling is done using the lme4 package in R (Bates, Mächler, Bolker & Walker, 2015;R Core Team, 2022). TIME was included as a quadratic polynomial term (similarly to Mazzola, Cornillie & Rosemeyer, 2022). A backward stepwise model selection process was followed in which the maximum model structure included interactions between TIME and each of the main predictors.…”