The expression of first-person-singular subjects in spoken Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese: Semantic roles and formulaic sequences
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Pekka Posio
The frequency of expressed first-person-singular subjects is significantly higher in European Portuguese (EP) than in Peninsular Spanish (PS). In both languages, subject expression is sensitive to the relative focusing of attention on different participants of the event and same/switch reference. In addition, in both PS and EP, subject-pronoun usage with the most frequent verb lexemes shows a tendency to grammaticalization. The different grammaticalizing constructions account for part of the differences found between the two languages. In addition to examining the variable subject pronoun expression in PS and EP, the article discusses the use of semantic roles in cross-linguistic analysis and the role of frequency and formulaicity in grammaticalization.
© 2013 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- A questionnaire study of two-verb clusters in West Central German
- Completives as markers of non-volitionality
- How common is r-Epenthesis?
- On the many faces of incompleteness: Hide-and-seek with the Finnish partitive object
- Causative morphemes as a de-transitivizing device: what do non-canonical instances reveal about causation and causativization?
- There are existential constructions and existential constructions: Presumption-invoking existentials in English
- When the indefinite article implies uniqueness: A case study from Old Italian
- Idiomatic proclivity and literality of meaning in body-part nouns: Corpus studies of English, German, Swedish, Russian and Finnish
- The expression of first-person-singular subjects in spoken Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese: Semantic roles and formulaic sequences
- BOOK REVIEWS
- MISCELLANEA: Report on the 45th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (Stockholm, Sweden, 29 August–1 September 2012)
