The (non-)grammaticalization of possession in Guatemalan Spanish
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Martin Elsig
Abstract
My study focuses on Guatemalan Spanish and discusses a distinctive morphosyntactic property of it: the possibility of combining a prenominal weak possessive with a, usually indefinite, determiner (as in una mi hermana). On the basis of an empirical evaluation of spontaneous speech data, extracted from the Preseea-Guatemala corpus, I consider the distributional properties of this phenomenon and interpret the results against the background of current grammaticalization theory. In particular, I argue that an indefinitely marked DP can impede the grammaticalization of the possessive adjective.
Abstract
My study focuses on Guatemalan Spanish and discusses a distinctive morphosyntactic property of it: the possibility of combining a prenominal weak possessive with a, usually indefinite, determiner (as in una mi hermana). On the basis of an empirical evaluation of spontaneous speech data, extracted from the Preseea-Guatemala corpus, I consider the distributional properties of this phenomenon and interpret the results against the background of current grammaticalization theory. In particular, I argue that an indefinitely marked DP can impede the grammaticalization of the possessive adjective.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
-
Word order and related pragmatic or semantic effects
- Focus fronting and its implicatures 1
- Romance causatives and object shift 21
- Conditionally interpreted declaratives in Spanish 39
- Microparametric variation in Old ItaloRomance syntax 51
- Different effects of syntactic knowledge, associative memory and working memory in L2 processing of filler-gap dependencies 67
-
Morphology and semantics of the verb and verb placement
- The paradigmatic instantiation of TAM 85
- Deriving the readings of French être en train de 103
- On the syntax of datives in unaccusative configurations 119
- The perfect between Latin and Romance 159
- Productivity and Portuguese morphology 175
- Reflexively marked anticausatives are not semantically reflexive 203
-
Morphosyntax of the DP and its relation to clause structure
- Deverbal nominalization with the ‘Down’-operator 223
- The (non-)grammaticalization of possession in Guatemalan Spanish 239
- On Spanish possessive formation 261
- Language Index 277
- Subject Index 279
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
-
Word order and related pragmatic or semantic effects
- Focus fronting and its implicatures 1
- Romance causatives and object shift 21
- Conditionally interpreted declaratives in Spanish 39
- Microparametric variation in Old ItaloRomance syntax 51
- Different effects of syntactic knowledge, associative memory and working memory in L2 processing of filler-gap dependencies 67
-
Morphology and semantics of the verb and verb placement
- The paradigmatic instantiation of TAM 85
- Deriving the readings of French être en train de 103
- On the syntax of datives in unaccusative configurations 119
- The perfect between Latin and Romance 159
- Productivity and Portuguese morphology 175
- Reflexively marked anticausatives are not semantically reflexive 203
-
Morphosyntax of the DP and its relation to clause structure
- Deverbal nominalization with the ‘Down’-operator 223
- The (non-)grammaticalization of possession in Guatemalan Spanish 239
- On Spanish possessive formation 261
- Language Index 277
- Subject Index 279
