Bert Cornillie

Clitic Doubling is the linguistic phenomenon in which a clause contains both a clitic pronoun and a nominal or prepositional phrase, which refer to the same referent and have the same syntactic function. In this paper, we will only be concerned with postposed objects as in (1). (1) ¿Quién le dijo a ella que el aseo y compostura que gastaba no eran suficientes? (Pardo Bazán, Emilia 1883. La Coruña, España) ´Who told her that the neatness and composure that she had were not enough?´ Linguistic researchers have been trying to find out the motivation for the appearance and expansion of CD, a phenomenon which seems to go against all the rules of linguistic economy. One line of research views the expansion of CD as a phenomenon that goes hand in hand with the expansion of DOM (Cfr. Melis and Flores 2009). There is DOM with Direct Objects (DO) in Spanish when salient human DOs are marked by means of the preposition a ‘to’, whereas non-human DOs usually show up without a prepositional marke...

This paper presents an interactional approach to the evidential discourse markers por lo visto ‘seemingly’ and al parecer ‘apparently’. It is shown that these markers show a clear preference for interactional actions which involve exchange of information (tell, ask and reply). Moreover, it is argued that the distribution and the function of the two markers are related to the socioepistemic status of the speaker and the organization of the sequence. Primary knowers usually use evidential markers in second parts of the adjacency pair, with a distancing effect, whereas non-primary knowers use evidential markers in first parts. This way speakers seek a confirmation in the next turn, which has a mitigation effect. Our interactional analysis offers a more contextualized and detailed characterization of evidential discourse markers and allows us to understand the type of activities speakers are engaged in when using these knowledge related linguistic expressions.

In classical Spanish, que ‘that’-deletion, e.g. (1), was quite frequent with a wide range of predicates, whereas in contemporary Spanish, que can only be omitted in subjunctive complement clauses mainly following volitional verbs. (1)Por ende vos rogamos[Ø]le dedes entera fee y creencia. (anon. 1497)‘Thus we beg you [that] you give him full trust and belief’ Pountain (2015)suggests that que-deletion is a Latin calque typical of formal genres in the 16thcentury, which slowly disappears in the 17thcentury, and that the type of matrix verb governing que has an important influence on the alternation. Blas Arroyo & Miralles (2015, 2016)indicate that omission is especially common in lower prestige authors.This paper proposes a different parameter to be the main predictor of the alternation, namely the use of the subject in the subordinate clause (Spanish is a pro-drop language) and whether or not the subject is co-referential with the indirect object of the main clause(e.g. co-referentiality of vos 'you’ and the subject of dar in (1)).In line with Givón’s (2001)complementation scale, we claim that co-referentiality between subject and indirect object leads to increased syntactic integration, which then allows for the deletion of the complementizer. The parameter of-referentiality is related to the covert expression of the subordinate subject, as with ditransitive rogar‘request’ in(1). The Esbozo grammar (RAE 1973) mentions that deletion is possible with ditransitive verbs exclusively when the subordinate clause has no explicit preverbal subject. Blas Arroyo and Miralles (2015)confirm this tendency for the non-ditransitive verb creer (‘to believe’), emphasizing the adjacency of the main and the subordinate predicates as a basis for omitting the complementizer. However, it has been shown that with many other verbs deletion was favored by an overt subject, which is then claimed to mark the boundaries between the clauses, making the presence of the conjunction redundant (see also Pountain 2015:79). Hence, both the absence and presence of an overt subject seem to play a role in que-deletion depending on whether it concerns a ditransitive construction or not. We conduct a logistic regression analysis of some 3000 tokens from the historical CODEA+-corpus (GITHE, 2015) in order to predict the relationship between the dependent binary variable (que vs ø) and multiple independent variables (presence and position of overt subjects, presence, and type of objects of the main verb--clitic pronoun, lexical expression, stressed pronoun, doubling--that co-refer with the subject of the subordinate verb), so as to account for the origins, spread, and decline of que-deletion. Our results indicate a clear effect of the coreferentiality variable: que-deletion is favored by indirect object-subject coreferentiality, which promotes the subordinate clause integration and it is typical of, but not restricted to, manipulation verbs (Givón 2001). In addition, the presence of intervening material between the clauses disfavors the omission of que. Thus, the paper highlights that an explanatory analysis of que-deletion needs to go beyond the parameter of the lexical semantics of the matrix verb (volition, fear), analyzing also the prominence and co-referentiality of its objects.

This special issue explores the role of Latin in shaping the syntactic patterns of the European languages. Among the key issues examined are the identification of sources of syntactic change, whether internal or external, the chronologization of these changes, and their actualization. Authors have tackled such cutting-edge topics as the role of sociolinguistic motivation in syntactic change in the vernaculars, the complex role played by translators, and the syntactic creativity that may occur as a result of calquing. Several authors, conversely, question the role of Latin in influencing particular structures, and propose alternative explanations. It is hoped that the present special issue succeeds in filling some gaps in our understanding of the roofing effects of Latin, as we attempt to track down and interrogate the causes and effects of syntactic change in the languages of Europe.

This paper addresses the auxiliation/grammaticalization of amenazar (Spanish), dreigen (Dutch), threaten (English), against the background of the competition between the vernacular languages and Latin. It shows that the subjective reading of ‘threaten’, expressing a prediction on the basis of some kind of evidence, is a Latin calque, and that the syntactic creativity or syntactic elaboration starts from this calque. In the three cases, ‘threaten’ is combined with the semantics of ‘fall’, which indicates the roofing role of Latin. The paper shows that the pace of the constructional change from ‘threaten’ + np to ‘threaten’ + inf is different from one language to another. Spanish amenazar grammaticalizes into an auxiliary during the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th century. In the case of Dutch, by contrast, only in the Golden Age of the 17th century do writers start to use dreigen ‘threaten’ as an auxiliary. Finally, English develops the auxiliary one century later than the Dutch one...

En este articulo se analizan algunas construcciones modales espanolas en el marco de la teoria de la subjetivizacion. Segun Langacker, el mayor grado de subjetivizacion lo tienen los modales ingleses llamados 'predicaciones de anclaje', ya que no tienen flexion, participio e infinitivo. Se argumentara que si bien los modales espanoles no son predicaciones de anclaje propiamente dichas (por su flexion y su participio), si tienen un estatus especial por la ausencia de infinitivo. El autor muestra que poder no aparece en infinitivo cuando perfila un proceso de infinitivo expresando modalidad epistemica. El modal "deber" nunca aparece en infinitivo, mientras que "tener que" si puede usarse como infinitivo.

This paper discusses different degrees of lexical/grammatical evidentiality. I show that the specific function of evidential parecer constructions is linked to the grammatical or lexical status of the verb. The data suggest that there is a correlation between the continuum from lexical to grammatical, on the one hand, and the modes of knowing expressed, on the other. It is shown that the higher the degree of grammaticalization of a parecer construction is, the less evidential values it can express. A series of functional-pragmatic tests indicate that the parece que construction involves a broader array of evidential types than both me/le parece que and parecer + infinitive. These two constructions can be considered the lexical and the grammatical endpoints of the continuum, respectively. The tests confirm the claim that me/le parece que is attached to the conceptualizer, whereas the grammaticalized parecer + infinitive construction conveys an inferential qualification that is restricted to the speaker. The concept of (inter)subjectivity is presented as a useful addition to source-evidentiality. Subjectivity refers to the speaker’s exclusive access to the evidence, whereas intersubjectivity is about shared access to the evidence. The intersubjective statements, here expressed by parece que, are considered to have broader support than the subjective ones conveyed by parecer + infinitive. They can be seen as more reliable and, hence, can explain why the Hispanic linguistic literature labels them as expressing “near-factivity”, while subjective statements, based on the speaker’s inference only, lead to a “non-factive” interpretation. Thus, the different distribution of the evidential readings with parecer gives a more delicate analysis of the different evidential values of lexical and grammatical expressions. *

ubjectification is a widespread phenomenon and has emerged as a most pervasive tendency in diachronic semantic change (Traugott) and synchronic semantic extension (Langacker). The papers of this thematic volume emphasize the importance of the particular process and also develop and extend it beyond currently available published research. The challenge for every single paper is to show whether the two major approaches (Langacker´s and Traugott´s) can possibly be integrated or whether they are fundamentally different. The papers also investigate whether we have a continuum from highly subjective to more objective, whether subjective need be opposed to objective, or whether subjective may also be understood in contrast to neutral, which is often the case in Traugott's examples of grammaticalization. Furthermore, the issue of intersubjectivity, i.e., putting the addressee's perspective onstage, is also discussed.

The papers in this volume examine how Spanish speakers express attention to their interlocutors (or co-participants) verbally. It is now generally accepted that subjective expressions have interactional functions, encouraging the flow of discussion and creating cohesive discourse and that there are several ways of dealing with the intersubjective or dialogic nature of language: (i) studying heteroglossia or dialoguing voices in monologic texts, (ii) focusing on how in talk-in-interaction speakers refer to information held by the co-participant, (iii) examining intersubjective markers that encode the speaker’s assumptions about the co-participant. Concepts such as politeness, argumentation structure, attenuation and hedging are being used to account for the interactional dynamics examined. Moreover, several papers analyze the difference between spoken and written registers and some offer new evidence for functional paths of linguistic change. In doing so, they enrich previous account...

Spanish has a series of evidential discourse markers that combine the lexical semantics of visual perception with reference to inference or hearsay, for example, evidentemente ‘evidently’, por lo visto ‘visibly, seemingly’, al parecer ‘seemingly’ and se ve (que) ‘one sees that, apparently’. The main aim of this article is to examine the grammatical, semantic and interactional properties of these four evidential discourse markers in informal and formal spoken Spanish. From a semantic point of view, we study the evidential values expressed by these markers (i.e. direct evidence, reportative, inference) and discuss the correlations between them. From a functional point of view, we analyse the evidential markers on the basis of discourse-interactional criteria such as illocutionary force, position in the turn and kind of turn. From a grammatical point of view, we address the preferences in terms of person and Tense/Aspect/Modality (TAM) experienced by these evidential markers in discour...

... Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Delbecque, Nicole (2006): Spanish (de)queísmo: part/whole alternation and viewing arrangement. ... 37 García, Erica (1986): El fenómeno (de)queísmo desde una perspectiva dinámica del uso comunicativo de la lengua. ...

In this paper we present a corpus-based, cognitive-linguistic account of the singular/plural agreement alternation with binominal constructions belonging to the [N1singular + de + N2plural]-type. From a syntagmatic point of view, plural agreement reflects a shift from N1 as the head of the Noun Phrase towards N1 being a quantifier to N2. This view is in line with grammaticalization theory and holds for many examples, yet there are important counterexamples where we find a singular verb despite N1 being used as a quantifier. The Hispanic linguistic literature mentions several factors that would favor plural agreement with N2 such as an indefinite article, the distance between the verb and the subject, the position of the subject and pseudopartitive rather than partitive use. The corpus analysis will show that these factors are not conclusive. Our alternative account has recourse to the concept of lexical persistence and shows to what extent the quantifier use of N1 retains semantic f...

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In this paper I raise the question of how the concepts of speaker commitment and speaker involvement can be applied to evidential expressions. I therefore explore the distinction between commitment and non-commitment as a binary opposition (cf. Katriel and Dascal 1989, Kissine 2008) and show that a choice for a binary opposition leads to a clear differentiation of epistemic and evidential markers. Speaker involvement is different from speaker commitment, in that it is gradable. This notion will be relevant at both a propositional and an interactional level of analysis. At the propositional level, I claim that speaker involvement refers to the speaker’s processing of the evidential qualification when presenting a state of affairs. At the interactional level, speaker involvement will be shown to play a role in the online planning of the flow of discourse. In my corpus analysis of the Spanish evidential adverbials al parecer ‘apparently’ and por lo visto ‘seemingly’, I will argue that the coparticipant’s reply to evidentially qualified propositions is an important methodological tool to examine speaker involvement. Moreover, the monitoring of the evidential dimension in interaction will shed new light on non-commitment (cf. Déchaine et al 2017).