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- Title
Accounting for syntactic variation in diachrony.
- Authors
Granvik, Anton
- Abstract
This paper addresses the early variation in what has been called the [prep_<italic>que</italic>] variable in Spanish nominal complement clauses, i.e. the alternation between <italic>de que</italic> and <italic>que</italic> in examples such as <italic>en <bold>señal (de) que</bold> lo estimo, Zulema, este anillo ofrezco</italic> (CORDE) ‘as a sign that I appreciate You, Zulema, I offer this ring’. By applying several subsequent quantitative analyses on corpus instances of the sequences N <italic>de que</italic> and N <italic>que</italic>, the locus of variation is restricted to such an extent that the variation can largely be accounted for. A collostructional analysis identifies 31 central nouns of the N <italic>de que</italic> complement clause construction. A diachronic cluster analysis delimits the temporal dimension of the variation to the 16th and 17th centuries. A distinctive collexeme analysis identifies nine nouns which are used in both constructional formats to a comparable degree: <italic>causa</italic> ‘cause’, <italic>duda</italic> ‘doubt’, <italic>esperanza</italic> ‘hope’, <italic>fe</italic> ‘faith’, <italic>opinión</italic> ‘opinion’, <italic>recelo</italic> ‘fear’, <italic>señal</italic> ‘sign(al)’, <italic>sospecha</italic> ‘suspicion’, and <italic>temor</italic> ‘fear’. Detailed contextual analysis of the use of these nine nouns by means of a mixed-effects logistic regression reveals that the use of the nouns with a determiner is correlated with the <italic>de que</italic> variant, and the use of the nouns as part of complex predicates, as in <italic>tener sospecha</italic> ‘have suspicion’, is associated with the <italic>que</italic> variant of the complement clause.
- Subjects
NOUNS; NOMINALS (Grammar); CLAUSES (Grammar); HISTORICAL linguistics; SYNTAX (Grammar)
- Publication
Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 2017, Vol 31, Issue 1, p242
- ISSN
0774-5141
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1075/bjl.00010.gra