Constructions of uncontrolled state or event

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Elvira
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Construction ◽  
Semantic Values

Spanish and other Romance languages inherited from Latin the seeds of a new construction that is common to the syntax of some verbs belonging to the field of emotions, feelings, pain or modality. The semantic values of this construction are strange to prototypical transitivity and are coupled with a marked argument structure, compared with the more common transitive sentence. In the early centuries of the history of Spanish only a few verbs were integrated in the new scheme, which could receive an experience, modal or quantitative meaning, depending on an analogical association with certain frequent verbs. As the construction gained productivity, the importance of these few specific verbs as models for the newly integrated ones was reduced and the construction as a whole was understood in a more general sense of uncontrolled state or event. This paper provides a history of the construction in its different stages and tries to uncover the mechanism and factors that favored the increase in its productivity over the centuries. It also attempts to understand these facts from a typological standpoint, as an effect of some kind of a transitivity split that took place in Old Spanish, which gave rise to a type of marked construction, associated to some specific verbs.

Intervocalic lenition and word-boundary effects

Diachronica ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Ignacio Hualde
Keyword(s):  
Sound Change ◽  
Word Boundary ◽  
Boundary Effects ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Explanatory Account ◽  
History Of

The lenition of intervocalic consonants is typically phonologized in sound change only within word domains. At first blush, this morphological restriction might seem to contradict the Neogrammarian hypothesis of exclusively phonetic conditioning in sound change. In this paper I examine the weakening of intervocalic voiced stops/affricates in Istanbul Judeo-Spanish. Comparison with Old Spanish shows that in the native lexicon intervocalic lenition has affected only word-internal consonants. Even consonants following a prefix boundary remain unaffected. I argue that, at the time of the expulsion of the Spanish Jews, the language already had the spirantization process, at least in incipient form. This process, which continues to operate across the board in Mainstream Spanish, became restricted at the word level in Judeo-Spanish. This interpretation, consistent with the Neogrammarian hypothesis, is the only one that offers an explanatory account and is supported by the evidence from other similar developments in the history of the Romance languages and with results from recent acoustic studies on incipient or optional lenition processes.

scholarly journals Resultatives and low depictives in English

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josep Ausensi ◽  
Alessandro Bigolin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Academic Press ◽  
Result State ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Unique Path ◽  
Syntactic Approach ◽  
Path Constraint ◽  
Syntactic Derivation

Abstract We argue against a purely semantic account of the Unique Path Constraint (Goldberg, Adele. 1991. It can’t go down the chimney up: Paths and the English resultative. In Proceedings of the seventeenth annual meeting of the Berkeley, 368–378. Linguistics Society), i.e., the constraint that there can only be one result state in a single clause, and in favor of a syntactic restriction regarding event structure. We propose, following Mateu, Jaume & Víctor Acedo-Matellán. 2012. The manner/result complementarity revisited: A syntactic approach. In M. Cristina Cuervo & Yves Roberge (eds.), The end of argument structure? Syntax and semantics, 209–228. New York: Academic Press, that structurally there can only be one result predicate per clause since the little v head selects for one result predicate as its complement. In order to make our claim, we provide novel data that violate the Unique Path Constraint defined as a semantic constraint. Further, we analyze examples that at first blush pose a problem for the present account as they appear to involve two result phrases, e.g., shot him dead off the horse. We argue, however, that the second result phrase is not syntactically a result, but rather constitutes a case of what Acedo-Matellán, Víctor, Josep Ausensi, Josep Maria Fontana & Cristina Real-Puigdollers. forthcoming. Old Spanish resultatives as low depictives. In Chad L. Howe, Timothy Gupton, Margaret Renwick & Pilar Chamorro (eds.), Open romance linguistics 1. Selected papers from the 49th linguistic symposium on romance languages. Berlin: Language Science Press have called low depictives, which join the syntactic derivation through a low applicative head.

scholarly journals {Tener/llevar} + participio en el castellano de los Siglos de Oro y algunas notas interlingüísticas

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (16) ◽  
pp. 87
Author(s):  
Patricia Fernández Martín
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Dual Nature ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Chronicles Of The Indies ◽  
History Of

El objetivo del presente trabajo es profundizar en la historia del funcionamiento de las construcciones castellanas {tener/llevar} + participio, tomando como centro de estudio la lengua de los siglos xvi y xvii y estableciendo ciertas comparaciones, a lo largo del texto, con otras lenguas romances, en especial el asturiano. El punto de partida se encuentra en la idea de que los problemas que crean estas construccionesse deben esencialmente a la doble naturaleza del participio (adjetival y verbal), solo comprensible inserta en un continuum entre el puro adjetivo y el puro verbo. Para ello, comenzaremos estableciendo, en el marco teórico, nuestro concepto de perífrasis verbal de participio y su aplicación a las construcciones que nos ocupan en el español de los Siglos de Oro. En una segunda parte, analizaremos el funcionamiento de dichas estructuras en el español clásico, empleando un corpus formado por tres génerosdiscursivos, escritos entre 1519 y 1656, que componen sendos subapartados (novelas picarescas, epístolas y crónicas de Indias). La principal conclusión es que los géneros discursivos no afectan a las construcciones de participio en la misma medida en que puede afectar a otros fenómenos gramaticales, como los pronombres personales.The aim of this work is to deepen in the history of the Spanish structures{tener/llevar} + participle, taking into account the language of the 16th and 17th centuries and offering certain comparisons with other Romance languages, specially Asturian. The starting point lies in the idea that the problems that create these constructions are essentially due to the dual nature of the participle (between a verb and an adjective), which can be only understood into a continuum, whose ends are the pure adjective and the pure verb. For that, we will start setting our concept of participial periphrases in the theoretical framework, as well as its applicationto the Spanish language spoken in the Golden Age. Then, we analyze how these structures work in that Spanish, using a corpus formed by three discourse genres (picaresque novels, letters and chronicles of the Indies), whose texts were written between 1519 and 1656. Finally, all of which allows to conclude that the discourse genres do not affect the appearance of the constructions of participle in the same extent that it may affect other grammatical phenomena, such as personal pronouns.

Spanish Folklore in the Southwest: The Pioneer Studies of Aurelio M. Espinosa

1978 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-237
Author(s):  
J. Manuel Espinosa
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
First Century ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
History Of

The centuries-old Spanish folk heritage of our Southwest, and its many faceted and enduring influence on the cultural life of the region, has been written about from various rims of observation. This article describes the pioneer studies of Aurelio M. Espinosa on Spanish folklore in the Southwest, with special emphasis on northern New Mexico. Although he made important contributions to the study of Spanish folklore of southern Colorado, Arizona, and California, and to that of Spain, Mexico, and other parts of Spanish America as well, he devoted most of his research and field work to the upper half of New Mexico which is the richest field of Spanish folklore in the Southwest.In viewing the cultural history of New Mexico, Espinosa reminded his readers that its first century as a Spanish colony, the 17th, was the second great century of Spain's Golden Age of arts and letters. With the vigor of Spain's sense of mission in those centuries, her Golden Age radiated to all parts of Spanish America via Mexico City, Lima, and the other principal colonial capitals. At the same time, from the bookshelf and the store of knowledge of the humble missionary, and the folklore of the Spanish settlers, passed down from generation to generation, the spirit of the Golden Age was reflected on the most remote settled frontiers.

Diachronic features of Romanian in a broader comparative setting

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-222
Author(s):  
Alexandru Nicolae
Keyword(s):  
Structural Properties ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Romance Language ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Syntactic Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Diachronic Development

Chapter 6 highlights the novel theoretical and empirical facts brought about by the word order changes that occurring in the passage from old to modern Romanian, showing how the diachrony of Romanian may contribute to a better understanding of the history of the Romance languages and of the Balkan Sprachbund, as well as to syntactic theory and syntactic change in general. One important dimension of diachronic variation and change is the height of nouns and verbs along their extended projections (lower vs higher V- and N-movement). The two perspectives from which language contact proves relevant in the diachronic development of word order in Romanian, language contact by means of translation and areal language contact, are discussed. The chapter also addresses the issue of surface analogy vs deep structural properties; once again, Romanian emerges as a Romance language in a Balkan suit, as Romance deep structural properties are instantiated by means of Balkan word order patterns.

The V2 syntax of Medieval Romance

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Sam Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
Old French ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Medieval Romance ◽  
Quantitative Evidence ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Old Occitan ◽  
Old Portuguese ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Detailed Presentation

This chapter provides a detailed presentation of the main data and arguments which have been proposed in favour of claiming that the Medieval Romance languages were V2 systems and considers data from Old French, Old Occitan, Old Italo-Romance varieties, Old Spanish, and Old Portuguese. It provides new qualitative and quantitative evidence to show the nature of the prefield, Germanic inversion, matrix/embedded asymmetries, and the precise types of verb-first and verb-third-or-greater orders provide new evidence in favour of the V2 hypothesis. It also suggests that the diachronic emergence of a V2 grammar is entirely plausible on the basis of the available data. The main objections to the V2 account proposed in the literature are evaluated and argued to face empirical and theoretical problems.

Changes in the argument and event structure of psych verbs in the history of Spanish

2019 ◽  
pp. 249-270
Author(s):  
Montserrat Batllori ◽  
Elisabeth Gibert-Sotelo ◽  
Isabel Pujol
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Event Structure ◽  
Psych Verbs ◽  
History Of

This chapter offers a detailed study of changes affecting the argument structure of Spanish psych verbs that appear with a dative experiencer (EXP). After proposing a three-way classification of these verbs based on their etymological origin, the chapter traces two parallel, but interconnected, diachronic paths: the first one involves the development from transitive (or pronominal) to unaccusative constructions with a dative EXP, whereas the second one concerns the evolution from dynamic to stative events. The use and decrease of the passive in Classical Spanish is also shown to play a role in this change: to wit, passive and unaccusative structures with a dative EXP are structurally similar, as the prepositional agent phrase and the dative EXP originate in the same position.

History of the Torre Latinoamericana

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Beckhart
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Construction Projects ◽  
Historic District ◽  
Care Needs ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Education And Health ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Construction ◽  
Historic City ◽  
The City

Historians have extensively explored the topic of architecture in Mexico City in the 20th century. From the relationships between politics, public patrons, new construction technologies, and new idioms of modernism, the impressive story of architecture in this megalopolis continues to astound and captivate people’s imaginations. Architecture was a channel that politicians used to address housing, education, and health care needs in a rapidly growing city. Yet scholars have not been especially concerned with private construction projects and their influence on the process of shaping and being shaped by the visual representation of Mexico City. Private building projects reveal an alternative reality of the city—one not envisioned by politicians and public institutions. Private construction projects in the historic city center are particularly interesting due to their location. These buildings are built on ancient clay lakebeds and volcanic soil on which the Aztecs first built the city. Not only are these buildings located in the heart of the city, the buildings in the rest of the historic district are also sinking. Any building in a historic district that has withstood the test of time should be an object of interest to scholars. The Torre Latinoamericana is perhaps the only building in the historic district and the entire city that ceases to sink, and instead floats! Located on the corner of Madero and San Juan de Letrán, the building sits at the heart of history, culture, and ancient Aztec clay lakebeds. The Torre Latinoamericana was built between 1948 and 1956 and is one of the most important visual symbols of resilience and modernity in Mexico City today.

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