Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie

This collected volume combines firmly-grounded theoretical perspectives with historical empirical data from different West Iberian languages (Portuguese, Galician, Asturleonese and Spanish) to deepen our understanding of linguistic divergence in typologically related languages.

It is divided into four sections: nominal, verbal and clausal domains, negation and polarity. While varied in their theoretical approach, contributions all serve to examine different aspects of the overarching issue of divergence and how current theoretical frameworks help us understand what factors can account for the actuation changes in West Iberian languages.

The book closes with a reflection on various findings about divergence(s), underscoring the importance of incorporating West Iberian languages in revisiting long-standing issues and broadening the empirical evidence available for ongoing research on linguistic theories of language change.

Romance and indigenous languages coexist across many parts of Africa, creating intricate dynamics that shape national identities, influence educational systems, and inspire cultural expression.

This volume focuses on thirty-eight countries where French, Portuguese, and Spanish are spoken or faint traces of Italian persist, occasionally broadening its scope to cover the entire continent, and draws comparisons with the role of English. It explores how these languages were introduced to the continent, how they have merged into African multilingual environments, developed distinctive features, and how these are perceived by different speakers, before concluding with a series of case studies that bring the discussion into sharper focus.

The outcome is the first comprehensive monograph to systematically address linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cultural topics across all Romance languages relevant to Africa. With particular attention to the accessibility of its structure, content, and languages, the volume testifies to Africa’s rich linguistic diversity and creativity, transcending colonial boundaries and giving rise to vibrant contemporary cultures.

This volume gathers a thematic selection of scientific contributions presented at the 17th Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology Meeting (Zurich, 11–13 September 2023). The chapters address linguistic phenomena at the intersection of syntax, morphology and pragmatics and apply formal analyses on both northern and central-southern Italo-Romance varieties.

Specifically, a great amount of data is provided for Lombardy, Trentino-Alto Adige and Istria in the North and for Campania, Calabria and Puglia (including Salento) in the South. Most chapters offer newly discovered information from first-hand fieldwork or diachronic investigations. As for the problems examined, the authors focus on aspects such as argument structure, interrogatives, the behaviour of clitics, the structure of the noun phrase and topics of simple sentence syntax.

Through close analyses of issues related to these (and other) aspects, the book significantly enriches our knowledge of Italo-Romance varieties.

This monograph addresses the multidimensional variation of the vocative in current colloquial Spanish. From a cognitive approach, it analyzes its distribution as a function of linguistic, socio-situational and interindividual factors linked to personality. The results of this qualitative-quantitative analysis underline the key role of the vocativo in interaction management and in the interlocutors' identity construction.

This volume examines specialist dictionaries of sexual vocabulary in French from the perspective of emancipation and presents the history of this so far largely overlooked text type. A close gender and taboo-linguistic analysis of six works from the late nineteenth and twentieth/twenty-first centuries reveals which sexual practices were recorded lexicographically, how they were evaluated, and how gender roles were distributed.

Tense and aspect are crucial devices of sentence meaning. They interact with Aktionsart, but also with verb types and adverbs when indicating temporal relations and building temporal discourse structure. On the discourse level, they are co-determined by narrative functions, enhancing the complexity of their description. The volume depicts this vast field. It unites twelve contributions which elaborate on three thematic cores: 1) the context-sensitivity of tense and aspect and their relationships with neighbouring categories, 2) their interaction with adverbs, 3) their functioning in discourse.

The volume advances our knowledge of the matters at hand in different respects. It discusses the onomasiological status of categories such temporality and aspectuality critically. It addresses the functioning of tense in discourse from various angles. A further focus is placed on the imperfective past tense-aspect form, its uses and meaning potentials. Its analysis ranges from marking evidentiality to indicating perspectives. The volume combines papers with various theoretical approaches and methodologies, notably, formally oriented linguistics and data-driven accounts. The multiplicity of subjects and methods may resonate beyond the field of Romance linguistics.

The study deals with petitions from the Esclavos series of the Ecuadorian National Archives from court cases of the Corte Suprema de Quito in the period 1702–1849, in which enslaved people were involved directly. The focus is on the study of argumentative strategies as discourse traditions: including topoi, linguistic means of constructing ethos and pathos, and linguistic marking of argumentative functions and structures.

Since the 1960s, Afro-Hispanic linguistics has produced vital knowledge at the intersection of African diaspora studies and Spanish sociolinguistics – yet many misconceptions persist in research literature. To challenge those biased assumptions, the contributions gathered in this volume present current research on Afro-Hispanic varieties from both sides of the Atlantic (Equatorial Guinean Spanish, Palenquero, Afro-Puerto Rican Spanish from Loíza, San Andrean [Colombia] Raizal Spanish) and address the influence of Portuguese-based Creoles on Afro-Hispanic varieties during the early colonial era.

Conceived in cooperation with students, activists, social workers, civil servants, and researchers who work with Afro-Hispanic languages and communities (as well as with other languages and communities who suffer linguistic, social, and racial marginalization), this volume adopts a social justice framework that seeks tangible, material, and quality-of-life improvements for the speech communities in which it investigates. It includes best practices for empirical research, recruitment of respondents and informants, fieldwork and archival work, and pedagogical and community-facing applications of research.

This work offers a substantial advance in the study of the macrosyntax of Spanish. Situated in the field of discourse realization, it provides theoretical foundations and a precise methodology. It describes the units of discourse, the new categories that must be taken into account to describe speech (operators, connectors and constructions), and integrates the diachronic aspect, in a dynamic vision of the language.

Cross-linguistically, motion verbs are frequently involved in language change and feature a wide array of motion-related constructions. The aim of this volume is to grasp more completely the typological characteristics and the developmental potential of motion verbs and to acknowledge the formal and functional diversity of motion-related constructions in Romance languages. To this end, the contributions in this collection provide synchronic and diachronic as well as typologically oriented studies that focus on motion verbs and single- and multi-verb constructions that have received scant attention to date. These include verbal periphrases, (pseudo-/semi-)copula and pseudo-coordinated constructions in Spanish, Italian, Romanian, French and French-based Creoles. In comparison to previous research on Romance languages, the present volume also adopts a broader perspective on language change, taking into account not only grammaticalization processes but also discursive, lexical and pragmatic phenomena such as the development of discursive, quotative or mirative functions. The studies build on functional, usage-based and constructionist models of language change and rely on corpus-based as well as experimental empirical approaches.

The book provides an overview of the evolution of phasal periphrases from Latin to Spanish, from the perspective of diachronic construction grammar, grammaticalization and discourse traditions. It also addresses the periphrastic character of phasal structures, as well as aspects that have been marginalized to date (chains of periphrases, possibility of double passivization or dialectal variation).

At the intersection between the semantic web and historical linguistics, this study focuses on lexical semantics to examine the potential modeling of resources from Old and Middle French as well as Old Gascon as linked data. The objective is to establish structural and conceptional data interoperability across resources and to provide access to data across different disciplines, domains, and languages.

The concepts of "plurilinguism" and "multilingualism" are normally used in studies dealing with current linguistic realities observed in communities of speakers. This volume collects eleven essays which apply these categories to historical settings, spanning a period from the Middle Ages until the late Renaissance. It demonstrates that contacts between languages have, for centuries, characterized and shaped the linguistic realities of Europe.

The concept of love’s wound has haunted European culture for centuries. This book investigates this fundamental concept in Medieval French, Occitan, and Italian literature – with the purpose of tracing its transformation through a selection of medieval literary masterpieces, sacred and profane. The imagery of love’s wound is analysed with multiple approaches, considering also representations of the theme in manuscript illuminations.

Based on qualitative research, this book addresses the tension between language and identity in the context of the complex multilingual situation of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The connection between multilingualism and identity is explored both from the individual perspective, through language biographical interviews, and from the societal perspective, through press texts.

This book examines the Romanian mihi est construction (Mi-e foame/frică, me.dat = is hunger/fear ‘I am hungry/ afraid’). While it disappeared from all other Romance languages to be replaced with a habeo structure, the mihi est pattern is in Romanian the most common way of expressing psychological or physiological states. By means of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, the book investigates the status of the core arguments of the mihi est structure, i.e. the dative experiencer and the nominative state noun, as well as its evolution throughout the centuries.

The data analysis reveals that the dative experiencer syntactically behaves like nominative subjects, whereas the state noun shows predicate behavior. As for the evolution of the mihi est structure, the analysis shows a certain tendency toward innovation, since in present-day Romanian it can coerce nouns coming from other semantic fields into the construction’s psychological or physiological interpretation. Could this be another unique trait of Romanian, which causes it to seemingly go against the tendency of most Romance languages toward canonical marking of core arguments?

The contributions gathered in this volume are dedicated to the identification, terminographical description and representation of polylexemic terminological units (phrasemes, in particular phrases and collocations) used in a variety of specialty languages (marketing, chemistry, law, international trade, medicine).

Syllable types and lexicon are subject to diachronic language contact influences. Phonotactics and loanword vocabulary in Romance languages tend toward syllable simplification, but complex structures also persist, especially in learned loanwords. Furthermore, complex syllables can result from the tendency to erase unstressed vowels. In a center-periphery arrangement of the system, a phonotactic typology of the Romance languages is thus developed.

The work combines quantitative and qualitative methods for measuring text complexity using Spanish prose texts as an example. The possibilities and limitations of operationalizing semantic text complexity are demonstrated using the example of metaphor. Finally, a questionnaire study examines the extent to which the identified linguistic complexity profiles are related to empirically obtained data on the comprehensibility of the texts.

The book investigates historical patterns of vowel diphthongization, assimilation and dissimilation induced by consonants – mostly (alveolo)palatals – in Romance. Compiling data from dialectal descriptions, old documentary sources and experimental phonetic studies, it explains why certain vowels undergo raising assimilation before (alveolo)palatal consonants more than others. It also suggests that in French, Francoprovençal, Occitan, Rhaetoromance and dialects from northern Italy, mid low vowel diphthongization before (alveolo)palatal consonants started out with the formation of non-canonical falling diphthongs through off-glide insertion, from which rising diphthongs could emerge at a later date (e.g., Upper Engadinian OCTO ‘eight’ > [ɔc] > [ɔ(ə̯)c] > [wac]). Both diphthongal types, rather than canonical falling diphthongs with a palatal off-glide, could also give rise to high vowels (dialectal French [li] < LECTU, [fuj] < FOLIA). This same Gallo-Romance diphthongization process operated in Catalan ([ʎit], [ˈfuʎə]). In Spanish, on the other hand, mid low vowels followed by highly constrained (alveolo)palatals became too close to undergo the diphthongization process ([ˈletʃo], [ˈoxa]).

This volume describes the scripta used in Treviso in the first half of the fourteenth century, based on the study of different practical texts. The analysis of an accounting notebook allows for the first time to describe the more municipal variety of the Treviso dialect, while the edition of a handful of short legal texts helps reconstruct the characteristics of a vernacular influenced by Venetian.

The subject of the volume is the negotiation of competing claims to validity and truth of statements in discourse with a focus on the concept of "discursive combat." Based on a specially developed theoretical and methodological approach to the study of agonal discourses, linguistic manifestations of agonality are recorded and made visible using the example of the 2017 French presidential election campaign.

This volume provides a glossary (A–B) of the northern Italian dialectal lexicon found in the four redactions of Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus (1517–1544), the most important literary work written in macaronic Latin. The glossary is preceded by an introduction providing detailed information on Folengo’s language.

It could be alleged that present-day French linguistics is characterized by a specific connection between the epistemology of text and that of discourse. The contributions gathered in this volume aim to reconsider this link – or dichotomy? – in light of the latest research developments. They are organized in three parts: the first explores the text-discourse connection, while the second and third tackle the epistemologies of text and discourse.

While previous research on collective nouns in Romance languages mostly adopts a semasiological and theoretical perspective focusing mainly on one single language, the present study takes an onomasiological and comparative approach which is strongly based on empirical evidence.

Against this background and in analogy to the verbal domain, the work elaborates further the functional category of nominal aspectuality which describes the construal of extra-linguistic entities as well as the linguistic means reflecting it. In this sense, collective nouns are systematically compared with other (nominal) means of expression of collectivity in French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, focusing especially on object mass nouns, which have hardly been studied so far for Romance languages. On the basis of corpus analyses and acceptability judgement studies, a holistic picture is thus drawn of the semantic-syntactic and derivational properties of various noun types in the synchrony of present-day language as well as of the diachronic lexicalisation paths of these very nouns.

The work thus contributes to the understanding of the verbalisation of pluralities by linking and complementing previous monodimensional approaches and, above all, by placing them on a broad empirical basis.

This volume analyzes the fortune of books I–V of Diodorus Siculus’ "Bibliotheca historica" in the 15th and 16th centuries, based on the study of the first two translations into Italian. Published anonymously, they both derived from Poggio Bracciolini’s 1449 Latin version. The study investigates the history of these two texts, reconstructing, as much as possible, the context of their production, and offers a critical parallel edition.

While much scholarly attention has already been paid to some of the various phenomena of affectionate language – for example pet names and diminutive constructions – the same cannot yet be claimed for affectionate language as such. The author of this volume is the first to present a theory of affectionate modes of speaking, grounding it empirically using a corpus study of Chilean Spanish.

The contributions gathered in this volume explore the possible uses of Bible translations to open new perspectives in the history of Iberian Romance languages. In addition to the linguistic description of Bible translations, they provide innovative analyses of a number of morphosyntactic phenomena of high theoretical interest, thus contributing to improve our historical understanding of Castilian, Catalan and Portuguese.

This volume delves into the relationships and limits existing between the syntax, morphology, lexicon, semantics and pragmatics of the Spanish language. Tackling each a specific issue, the ten contributions draw on solid linguistic arguments, which proves their scientific value and will undoubtedly inspire more research in this field.

The book offers a panchronic analysis of queísmo, one of the oldest variational phenomena in Spanish syntax, from the Classical era to this day. Within the framework of historical sociolinguistics and on the empirical basis of a broad corpus of texts close to the pole of immediacy, the study analyzes the factors that have determined this variation at various points in time.

This volume looks at ten private autobiographies by (in part) literate eyewitnesses from the First World War with little writing practice to examine semantic-cognitive (coherence) and grammatical-structural (cohesion) textual contexts. It asks to which extent writers who usually only communicated orally were able to coherently and cohesively create long, complex texts by utilizing the means of written language.

This study analyzes the historical and sociolinguistic dynamics of dialect contact among Galloitalic dialects in Eastern Piedmont, which have been reconstructed with the analysis of several linguistic features. They have been examined at several levels of linguistic analysis, with special attention to the diatopic and diachronic variation. The study makes use of a great array of sources for linguistic data, such as field interviews, linguistic atlases, descriptive grammars, and historical texts.

The Dresden manuscript Ob.47 is a completely unknown, vernacular translation of the life of Alexander by Quintus Curtius Rufus, of which only one transmission exists. The text and manuscript were written in the mid-fifteenth century in Milan, with the historian Lodrisio Crivelli named as the translator. This volume provides a comprehensive philological analysis of the artifact, accompanied by an edition that is freely available online.

This volume brings together contributions by specialists from a variety of disciplines discussing the epistemological history of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the transmission of knowledge in the Crown of Aragon. They consider, among other things, the materiality of texts, the linguistic models employed, the persistence of ancient models of perceiving the world, up to the establishment of new ways of thinking and knowledge transfer.

At the border between Gallo-Romance and Italo-Romance, the dialects spoken in Menton as well as in the Roya and Nervia Valleys share distinctive systemic traits – morphophonological, in particular – that are absent in the neighboring varieties (Niçard, Costal Ligurian, Piedmontese). Based on a broad empirical dataset, the study isolates these archaic – and nowadays unique – Gallo-Italic traits, showing their clear affinity with Proto-Ligurian.

The 15th-century ms. 534 of Biblioteca Universitaria di Padova (Italy) contains an extensive Latin-Bergamasco glossary, known through its 1893 edition prepared by the German scholar Jean Etienne Lorck. This publication offers a new edition of this text, based on 21st-century editing principles and standards, and helps gain valuable new insight into the broad linguistic and lexical material the glossary preserves.

The book examines the impact of verbal semantics – telicity and affectedness, mostly – on differential object marking (DOM) in Spanish. It presents two studies providing empirical evidence for earlier claims and, additionally, integrates the results into an explanatory model based on the concept of prominence.

After a “first wave” of traditional studies on prepositional accusatives and a “second wave” exploring the typological dimensions of Differential Object Marking in Bossong’s footsteps, a new line of research is currently introducing new methods, deepening the level of analysis, and offering new perspectives on the issue. This volume presents 11 innovative, original contributions representative of this “third wave” of studies on DOM in Romance.

This study presents a phenomenological approach to word-internal vowel sequencing. Diphthongs and hiatuses are thus not objects of examination a priori; instead, as relational sequencing patterns, they are effects of the Gestalt qualities that determine the word structure, which manifest in prominences, syllabification, rhythm, and temporal and phonetic structure, and keep the word recognizable as a whole in the flow of speech.

This book aims to provide a better understanding of convergence and non-convergence phenomena, such as divergence, from different theoretical perspectives. It brings together nine case studies that deal with contact between languages found in the Iberian Peninsula (Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese and Basque), between Spanish or Portuguese and another language (such as English), and between different varieties from Europe and other continents. The volume thus unites views from two fields that rarely interact: contact linguistics and dialectology. It discusses the mechanisms and consequences of language contact within the Ibero-Romance world, a geographical space characterised by a high rate of multilingual speakers and settings. The contributions deal with various combinations of convergence and divergence, for example between different varieties of the same language, language stability despite contact, as well as less studied aspects, such as the relation between language contact and second language acquisition, the linguistic landscape perspective of language contact, and divergence in linguistic identity construction.

What shape does written language usage take in the diaries and letters of people with little routine or experience in writing? This volume looks at the geopolitical and historical context, the acquisition of written language and individual writing socialisation in order to examine this kind of writing on various linguistic levels as the expression of a heterogenous range of writing skills and different written language usage norms.

This contrastive discourse linguistic study examines language planning in Germany and France as a public, historical and ideological discourse system. Using critical theories and broad empirical documentation, it demonstrates the complexity of language planning discourses in transnationally connected knowledge societies and illuminates them against the backdrop of the language behaviour of the actors involved.

This volume deals with the plurality of French pronunciation norms from a panfrancophone perspective. Using linguistic productions from model speakers, as well as perceptions and representations from non-expert informants, it compares the traditional Parisian norm to the Swiss and Quebecois norms. Results show a bicentric trend with two dominant norms in Europe (Paris) and North America (Quebec).

Loanwords in Italian, in particular in the language of sport, were subject to vehement replacement attempts during fascism (1922–1943). This study examines the relationships between linguistic transformation and puristic intervention by taking an onomasiological, corpus-based approach, throws new light on fascist loanword purism and reveals mechanisms of lexical transformation in Italian (sporting) language.

The contributions gathered in this volume investigate the impact of shared knowledge on linguistic structure—whether shared knowledge determines the linguistic form or a given linguistic structure imposes a specific set of information. From an Ibero-Romance perspective, this book supports the necessity of a transversal approach to the grammar/pragmatics interaction.

This typological linguistic study determines its object, modern French, holistically in that its comprehensive typology takes into account everything that possesses form or morphology in a language. It provides a functional-structural and typological interpretation of not just grammar, but also semantically affine word formations, which it conceives of as “paragrammar”.

Text comprehension processes have long been neglected by pedagogy but are the focus of this empirically based study. How do processes like these take place from the perspective of cognition theory and text linguistics? Which interference factors impede the comprehension of texts in foreign languages? The book also provides a theoretical model that can be used to provide support in second language teaching.

Looking at the Protoromance suffix */-'ur-a/, this study offers new insights into Protoromance derivational morphology. After reconstructing and analyzing some 45 Protoromance etyma containing the suffix */-'ur-a/, it details the phonological, morphological and semantical properties of said suffix in a variational perspective.

This study presents a corpus-based semasiologial and onomasiological analysis of the paradigm of adjectives and adverbs of accuracy. Looking specifically at justo / justamente, cabal / cabalmente, preciso / precisamente, and exacto / exactamente, it is above all concerned with the development of three pragmatic-discursive functions: focalization, affirmation, and reformulation.

The study expands our understanding of the functions of proximal and distal demonstratives using the example of Old French. For the first time, in addition to referential anchoring, the author uncovers the ontological type of the “reference object.” The combination of these two criteria creates a functional profile that sheds new light on the diachrony of cist and cil.

This contrastive study analyzes the prefixation (notably the ablative type) of specific verb classes in Latin, Greek, Iberoromance languages (Spanish, Galician, and Catalan), and German. Based on the contrastive study of what is here labeled ‘preverbial systems’ and the interlingual comparison of prefixed verbs, it identifies the semantic and syntactic functions that can be attributed to these elements.

This volume gathers etymological, lexicological, and lexicographical studies of the Romanesco dialect, written by the most renowned experts in Romanesco and/or Italian linguistics. Considering all historical phases of Romanesco, past and present, they discuss a great number of words and word forms in relation to standard Italian and other varieties of Italian.

The study presents societal discourse on the status of Andalusian as a language, dialect, or local variant, starting from the basic principles of variation linguistics and linguistic anthropology. Using a newly developed method, it investigates the multiple social contexts in which Andalusian is discursively employed as a way to identify the respective (re)valorizations.

The third volume of the DÉRom contains about forty new lexicographical articles, documenting mainly hereditary Protoromance etyma, but also Gallic borrowings. The theoretical section gathers chapters discussing questions such as the Idioromance infrastructure of the DÉRom, polysemy, synonymy, and the substrates of Protoromance.

This volume provides a detailed overview of compounding in Italian, from the earliest stages until today. Based on an analysis of data from different corpora, it describes the compound words that Italian has created in the course of the centuries, highlighting elements of continuity with Latin as well as innovative aspects.

«Veneziano de là da mar», ‘Venetian from beyond the sea’, this is how Gianfranco Folena referred to vernaculars of the eastern Mediterranean (Dalmatia, Aegean Sea, western Asia) that were strongly influenced by the Venetian dialect. This volume gathers new contributions by leading specialists which discuss this particularly interesting case of language contact outside of Italy in the Middle Ages and in the beginning of the early modern era.

The twelve contributions gathered in this volume explore the history of the French language expansion, putting emphasis on the changes brought about by diatopic variation and language contact. They also analyze the role of language policies and normative representations on the dissemination of French, both in Europe and worldwide.

Starting from two premises, that texts are “greater than the sum of their parts,” and that text semantics and discourse traditions are closely linked, this study develops a linguistically based definition of semantic and discourse-traditional complexity and a model for analyzing it. This model is applied to a corpus of French short prose works to uncover patterns of complexity and connections between complexity and ambiguity.

This volume presents a study of the vernacular tradition of Chirurgia magna, one of the most important chirurgical treatises of the Middle Ages. Alongside an edition of the 15th-century Bergamo vernacular translation, based on ms. MA 501, it provides a historical-linguistic analysis and a glossary meant to illustrate the relationship between Latin and the vernacular in the formation of a medical terminology in the 14th and 15th centuries.

This volume discusses medieval volgarizzamenti of historical writings (religious as well as profane). All fourteen studies recognise the fact that in the late Middle Ages, these texts were an important meeting point for elitist and popular culture which mutually stimulated each other. At the same time, different worlds of knowledge came together as history, mythology, hagiography, and biblical narration were considered to form one entity.

Developments in the analysis of linguistic variation show the need for a theoretical model whereby variants are viewed as cognitively-based communicative choices. In this book, the analysis of the first and second grammatical persons in Spanish media discourse illustrates an approach to linguistic structure and usage as motivated by the need to create meaning at all semiotic levels.

Rather than mere sets of deictic forms, persons constitute arrays of functional strategies used by speakers to develop certain representations of themselves and others. The degree of salience attributed to some participant through grammatical configuration – including features like person, way of formulation and syntactic function – strongly conditions the discursive role of that participant, as well as the communicative situation at large. Methodologically, the demonstration conjugates the analysis of quantitative usage patterns with that of specific instances of choice, in order to elucidate the stylistic potential of syntactic forms in media contexts.

Understanding variation as the construction of meaning is essential to the scientific advancement of linguistics as an inherently social and cognitive discipline.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of the pretérito perfecto compuesto, one of the Spanish verb forms displaying the greatest variation in use. The study discusses its temporal, aspectual and modal dimensions and argues that the perfect tense used in the Romance languages can be understood as a temporal category expressing both simultaneity and anteriority. Finally, the author analyzes the different dialectal forms used in today’s Spanish.

This empirically oriented study examines the connection between conceptual orality/literacy and the degree of syntactic complexity in modern European Spanish – and in part, in French. For this purpose, the author syntactically analyzed a stylistically heterogeneous corpus of over 10,000 sentences, both qualitatively and quantitively.

This collection of essays discusses the linguistic categorization of semantic aspects in Spanish and their interrelations with lexicology, morphology, and syntax. From a number of different perspectives, the essays study phenomena such as lexicalization, grammaticalization, lexical and grammatical classes, compositionality, argument structure, lexical aspects, and the categories of language and reality.

In Buenos Aires, the coexistence of the voiced “ʒeísmo” and the voiceless “ʃeísmo” is a striking phonetic characteristic that remains a highly dynamic phenomenon. This urban dialectological and sociolinguistic study uses a diasystemic perspective to focus on the synchronal distribution of the pre-palatal variants and discusses both place and group specific and pragmatic factors influencing the variation.

In Spanish, when nominal and clausal accusative objects follow verbs, there are always two possible realizations: with or without a differential object marking (DOM) – finite or infinite. The study describes in detail the semantics of these structures and explains the formal opposition based on the principle of complexity iconization. Corpus and experimental data support the theoretical approach.

Crisis events, often understood as forces of nature, may also be perceived in entirely different ways, depending on the language and cultural context. Thus, the 2014 Argentine debt default was interpreted in public discourse as a challenge to be overcome and served as a discourse on national identity. This discourse-linguistic study examines the other side of the crisis and a pattern of resilient engagement with adversity.

This study of the first handwritten and literary reception records of the Vita Nuova provides an innovative addition to our understanding of Italian poetry of the Trecento. Studying the reception of the Vita Nuova through its textual vehicles, taking a literary textual analysis as a departure point for a paleographic examination and cultural historical evaluation, is an innovation in Dante research.

The use of voilà in French is rapidly increasing. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to this phenomenon, the authors point out explanatory factors that lead them to a functional hypothesis: by gathering scattered pieces of information and turning them into a perceptible ensemble, voilà enhances cognitive grouping.

This volume focuses on the historical pragmatics of the Italian language. The aim is to show the necessity of including the pragmatic function of language in order to adequately describe Old Italian syntax. It examines syntactically marked constructions in 13^th and 14^th century narrative texts that serve to express particular discursive functions, primarily in relation to topic and focus marking.

This monograph is the first large-scale corpus analysis of French il y a clefts. While most research on clefts focusses on the English ‘prototypical’ it-cleft and its equivalents across languages, this study examines the lesser-known il y a clefts – of both presentational-eventive and specificational type – and provides an in-depth analysis of their syntactic,　semantic and discourse-functional properties.

In addition to an extensive literature review and a comparison with Italian c’è clefts and with French c’est clefts, the strength of the study lies in the critical approach it develops to the common definition of clefts. Several commonly used criteria for clefts are applied to the corpus data, revealing that these criteria often lead to ambiguous results. The reasons for this ambiguity are explored, thus leading to a better understanding of what constitutes a cleft. In this sense, the analysis will be of interest to specialists of Romance and non-Romance clefts alike.

This study examines the function of allegorism in a total of 63 Romance language sermons from six 12^th and 13^th century sermon collections. A cognitive-semantic analysis of 250 individual allegories shows the ways that the authors of these sermons found opportunities for interpretative creativity within highly conventional patterns of interpretation.

In contrast to previous approaches to phonological typology, the typology of syllable and word languages relates the patterns of syllable structure, phoneme inventory, and phonological processes to the relevance of the prosodic domains of the syllable and the phonological word.

This volume proves how useful this kind of typology is for the understanding of language variation and change. By providing a synchronic and diachronic account of the syllable and the phonological word in Central Catalan (Catalan dialect group) and Swabian (Alemannic dialect group), the author shows how the evolution of Old Catalan and Old Alemannic can be explained in terms of a typological drift toward an increased relevance of the phonological word.

Further, the description of Central Catalan and Swabian allows to identify common strategies for profiling the phonological word and thus makes an important contribution to research on prosodic phonology.

Based on a set of oral corpora, this study offers a thorough analysis of topicalizing constructions in informal spoken French – both from a prosodic-syntactic and pragmatic-discursive point of view.

Even though a rich written tradition documents the evolution from Latin to French, the crucial transition from Late Latin to Old French in the oral language remains partially obscure. Thanks to a corpus-based approach and the collaboration of Latinists and French historians, this edited volume sheds a new light on this missing link.

The present study aims at offering an overview of Spanish-Portuguese (and Spanish-Galician-Portuguese) language contact, both in Europe and in America. It pays a special attention to the history of linguistic interferences in each region, examining how and when lexical borrowings entered the Spanish language and how they disseminated across the Spanish-speaking world.

Nearly 15 years after the formal recognition of indigenous peoples and their rights, this study uses the example of Yucatec Maya to examine Mexico’s complex multilingual tradition. Offering a speaker-centric perspective on the vitality of Maya, this comprehensive study paints a differentiated picture of the current situation of the language. It thus promises to be a valuable aid to future speaker-oriented revitalization projects.

Attempts at a typological classification of Old French have led to the question of whether Old French is a verb-second language. This study reformulates the question by analyzing syntactical data using systems theory and discourse tradition. Are language systems pertinent for understanding Old French syntax? Or should Old French syntax instead be explained using a discourse tradition that does not rely on systems?

This edited volume documents an attempt to integrate philological and grammatical approaches, kept strictly separate in traditional Romance language research, and to enable dialogue between proponents of each discipline. Philology and Grammar brings together two worlds that have more to say to each other than one might have suspected.

The study investigates prosodic, lexical, and syntactic variation in conceptual proximity and distance based on the example of conversational self-repair in French. In proximal speech, speakers tend to recontextualize corrections that would disrupt discourse with less grievous paraphrases. This procedure relies on conceptual proximity in conversation, and potentially leads to linguistic routinization.

This work undertakes a first-ever corpus-based synchronic and diachronic study of the avertive and proximative in Romance languages while considering both Latin and Ancient Greek. It systematically charts and verifies new pathways of grammaticalization based on corpus linguistics.

This study was awarded the Elise Richter Preis of Deutscher Romanistenverband 2017 and the Prize of the Offermann-Hergarten-Stiftung 2020.

This ambitious examination of all the proper names in the Chanson de Roland shows that it is finely structured even up to the smallest scenes, and substantially worldlier than has been generally assumed. This makes it possible to retrace the outlines of the Chanson’s long prehistory, though with diminishing certainty, as far back as the Frankish defeat of 778.

Only a few works on medical theory are extant in 14^th-century Old French. This book includes a partial edition and translation along with historical, dialectological, and source-analytic studies about an anonymous treatise on fever written after 1300 in Hebrew characters in eastern France. The medical vocabulary in Fevres is explained in glossaries that include many first-known references.

This work undertakes a first empirical and comparative investigation of Anglicisms in 12 Spanish-speaking Latin American countries. Unity and diversity are key themes in the study, which analyzes the use of English in daily newspapers, placing special emphasis on the graphic and morphological integration of borrowed terms. The study’s findings relativize existing notions of the influence exerted by English in the region, both in terms of its extent and its geographical distribution.

Winner of Fakultätspreis der Philosophischen Fakultät (Kiel University) 2016

This study focuses on the formalization of a fundamental experience of human existence: the act of perception. Unlike most other linguistic research dealing with the "prototypical" verbs of visual and auditory perception, it concentrates on the complicated polysemy of the multimodal verb sentir. The findings provide important new insight into the linguistic expression of perception in general.

This book provides an edition and a linguistic analysis of a Passion of the Christ written in old Milanese prose and preserved in a 15th-century manuscript. The study discusses the dating of this text, the geographical context, and its dependence on a Latin model. It also analyzes its relationship with other known prose Passions and identifies their sources. A concluding word glossary highlights the most interesting and obscure words and terms.

How and in which direction(s) is research in Ibero-Romance historical linguistics evolving? Now that the initial enthusiasm for the possibilities of digital corpora has worn off, the essays gathered in this volume reflect a more critical approach: corpora are being refined, while researchers discuss not only how reliable and representative they can be, but also ways in which to tackle certain gaps of the discipline.

¿Por dónde va la lingüística histórica iberorrománica? Superada ya la fase de entusiasmo inicial por las nuevas posibilidades que ofrecían los grandes corpus digitales, los estudios de este volumen muestran cómo actualmente predomina una visión más crítica: se refinan los propios corpus, se plantean cuestiones como la fiabilidad y la representatividad y se pone remedio a ciertos defectos que perduraban en la disciplina hasta hace pocos años.

Avraam Moshe Tadjer published his Notas istorikas sovre los djudyos de Bulgaria i la komunita de Sofya in Judeo-Spanish and Rashi script in 1932. The work is an essential document for the history of this Sephardic community and one of the last Judeo-Spanish texts published in Bulgaria before World War II. This book offers a critical edition of Notas istorikas preceded by a detailed cultural-historical and linguistic study.

There is no survey study to date that would have analyzed the history of spatial relations in Castilian Spanish, i.e. the prepositions, transitive adverbs as well as prepositional and adverbial locutions used for the spatial localization of entities. Based on an extensive corpus, this book offers a complete diasystematic characterization of these aspects and discusses new hypotheses with regard to their correlations.

This second volume on the Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman (DÉRom) contains forty new lexicographical articles as well as an extensive theoretical section which discusses various questions pertaining to the methods, problems and implications of comparative reconstruction in Romance linguistics (phonology, semantics, grammar, geolinguistics and cartography).

This study presents the history of bilingual German-Italian lexicography prior to 1900. It provides a detailed analysis of the lexicographical and language didactic works of Francesco Valentini, a Roman scholar working in Berlin. Through his example, it shows how a foundation was created for a modern lexicography of equivalence in the first half of the 19^th century.

Expanded edition of 10 French private texts from different regions, with a lot of new comments on spelling, morphology, syntax and lexicon. Revealing the authors’ differences in social status and education, they convey contrasting attitudes toward the linguistic standard of their time. The linguistic form of the original handwritten texts is strictly respected; graphical aids have been added to enhance their readability.

Scripto sopra Theseu Re is an anonymous commentary on Boccaccio’s epic poem Teseida, preserved in a 15th-century manuscript written in old Salentino dialect. Unedited to date and barely known even by Boccaccio experts, the commentary is one of the most extensive and significant texts written in the southern part of medieval Italy. The two volumes offer the first critical edition of the commentary as well as analyses of its sources and language.

Este volumen recoge diversos estudios sobre la subordinación adverbial en español. Este fenómeno comprende una multiplicidad de estructuras sintácticas en las que intervienen categorías gramaticales como las preposiciones, conjunciones y adverbios, que, en comparación con otras, han recibido poca atención desde el punto de vista de la sintaxis formal. Los fenómenos se analizan teniendo en cuenta el panorama lingüístico actual, por lo que se exponen explicaciones y generalizaciones cuyo alcance va más allá de la gramática de una lengua particular.

El volumen está dividido en dos partes. En la primera se presentan los planteamientos generales que han guiado los trabajos que lo componen y se analizan diversas cuestiones de índole diacrónica. La segunda parte recoge una serie de trabajos de tipo sincrónico que revisan cuestiones relacionadas con las diferentes estructuras sintácticas que tradicionalmente se han acogido como parte de la subordinación adverbial y, en consecuencia, los diferentes tipos de categorías sintácticas que encabezan estas construcciones.

En definitiva, el lector encontrará en esta obra una selección de trabajos que tratan de aportar luz al fenómeno de la subordinación adverbial en el caso particular del español.

Based on the broadest corpus ever analyzed (25 grammars published between 1440 and 1586), this study offers a comprehensive view of grammatical thought during the Italian Renaissance – the first of its kind since the works of Trabalza (1908) and Kukenheim (1932). Devoting a particular attention to the historical context, the method and structure of each work, it highlights three linguistic innovations: article, compound tenses, and conditional.

This study focuses on the spoken language of Italian-speaking inhabitants of the Ruhr Area. It offers an objective, quantifiable presentation of the differences in the forms of speech in pronunciation and prosody and examines the language spoken by Italians in the Ruhr Area in terms of phonetic and prosodic variations compared to Italian speakers in the province of Catania.

The study examines the connections between language and space, focusing on “linguistic territoriality.” The author discusses the behavioral patterns of language communities, which manifest themselves in the appropriation and defense of “language areas,” by illuminating conflict situations in Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Spain.

Combinando distintas perspectivas como la gramática generativa, la gramática tradicional y estudios empíricos ‘variacionistas’, el libro aborda el uso de los sujetos pronominales en el español hablado en Buenos Aires (porteño) y abarca dos objetivos principales. En primer lugar, determina las condiciones de uso de los sujetos explícitos e implícitos, tanto categóricos como variables. En este sentido, ya que el ‘sujeto nulo’ se asume como forma no marcada del sujeto, la cuestión fundamental es explicar la variante explícita del pronombre sujeto de la misma. Se observa que el sujeto expreso funciona unas veces como foco, tópico contrastivo o desambiguador, y otras como alternación del tópico (shift topic) o como marcador de la frontera de un tema ‘episódico’ nuevo. En segundo lugar, se describen sistemáticamente las diferentes funciones pragmáticas (foco, diferentes tipos de tópico) que asumen los pronombres sujeto en la interfaz sintáctico-prosódica. De este modo, el presente trabajo constituye una contribución importante al estudio de las características sintácticas y prosódicas de los sujetos pronominales explícitos en el habla espontánea de una variedad del español.

El libro aborda el uso de los sujetos pronominales en el español de Buenos Aires con un enfoque tanto teórico como empírico. Basándose en datos espontáneos, primero, se investiga la influencia de diferentes factores internos al sistema de la lengua en la expresión y la omisión de los sujetos pronominales, y después, se analizan los correlatos sintácticos y prosódicos de los sujetos explícitos con diferentes funciones discurso-pragmáticas.

The Diarii, faithful chronicle of the years between 1496 and 1533 written by the Venetian patrician Marino Sanuto, are considered an indispensable reference work for research on the late Renaissance. This present study provides a detailed linguistic and philological analysis of the Diarii, based on the edition Fulin et al. (1879–1903) as well as on excerpts of autographic manuscripts (Marc.It. VII, 228–286).

Sobre la historia del voseo, o el uso informal del pronombre «vos» y su morfología, se han hecho estudios con datos restringidos a cortos períodos de tiempo, lo que imposibilita el conocimiento global de su desarrollo lingüístico. Este libro ofrece una exposición completa de la evolución histórica del voseo en la región andina de Colombia desde el siglo XVI hasta el XX, en contraste con el mundo hispano. Vos evoluciona a partir de un pronombre latino plural hacia uno singular de respeto, que se populariza como tratamiento familiar en el siglo XVI y se estigmatiza. Desaparece de la escritura desde mediados del siglo XVII hasta principios del siglo XIX (período latente). Este libro documenta voseo en el período latente; realiza un análisis cuantitativo de los contextos lingüísticos y sociales de voseo en obras literarias y cartas privadas; y delinea la evolución morfológica. De esta manera, no solo ofrece datos novedosos para los investigadores interesados en las formas de tratamiento en español y sus orígenes, sino que hace un planteamiento metodológico de utilidad para sociolingüistas, filólogos y analistas del discurso.

El voseo, o el uso del pronombre «vos» en el trato informal, se destaca por su variedad morfológica, potencialidad expresiva y variación sociolingüística. Este estudio analiza tales aspectos de la evolución colonial y moderna del voseo en una variedad del español, la que se habla en la región andina de Colombia. Integra herramientas cuantitativas y cualitativas con base en ejemplos tomados de obras literarias, cartas y expedientes judiciales.

Quantification is central to human experience (cf. Aristotle’s Organon): the most basic aspects of human life and reasoning involve quantity assessment. This study sheds lights on a highly frequent way to express quantification in Spanish, viz. the binominal quantifier (e.g. un aluviónN1 de llamadasN2 ‘a flood of calls’) which assesses the quantity of N2 in terms of N1.

This volume offers a corpus-based, cognitive-functional analysis of binominal quantifiers (BQ) in Spanish. The first part is dedicated to the development of BQs and starts from the assumption that BQs are cross-linguistically involved in grammaticalization. This monograph frames the history of BQs in Spanish in terms of constructional levels of change and highlights the complex interplay between analogical thinking and conceptual persistence. The second part motivates both the ample variation in the paradigm of quantifying nouns and their combinatorial pattern by the very same mechanism of conceptually-driven analogy. The study thus yields an innovative functional model of BQs in Spanish, in synchrony and in diachrony, with major implications for reference grammars and theory building.

The contributions gathered in this volume discuss how, in which contexts, and under which circumstances “authorship” is constituted in medieval Romance literatures. Special focus is placed on the important question of how authority is established and conveyed in literary texts.

Este estudio está dedicado al castellano hablado en la Comunidad Autónoma Vasca (CAV o País Vasco) y, en particular, en Getxo. La autora investiga si el castellano hablado en esta región es una única variedad, o bien se compone de diversas variedades, con un núcleo común, usadas por los diferentes grupos de hablantes de la comunidad de comunicación vasca.

En la parte teórica, el estudio responde a esta pregunta elaborando una definición de qué debe entenderse por «castellano del País Vasco», teniendo en cuenta diversos factores sociales relevantes a la hora de describir la comunidad de comunicación vasca. Le precede un amplio repaso de otros trabajos dedicados al castellano hablado en la CAV.

En virtud de la definición propuesta se añade un estudio basado en un corpus oral de 20 entrevistas con informantes castellanohablantes monolingües de Getxo. Realizado desde una perspectiva variacional, dicho estudio analiza, cualitativamente, 17 fenómenos lingüísticos que se suelen considerar característicos del castellano del País Vasco. Asimismo, se proporcionan datos cuantitativos sobre la ocurrencia de cada fenómeno. A partir de sus resultados, la autora razona cuáles de los fenómenos estudiados forman parte del castellano de Getxo.

El trabajo, realizado desde una perspectiva variacional, estudia el castellano hablado en el País Vasco y, en particular en Getxo. La parte teórica propone una definición sobre el concepto «castellano del País Vasco», y la empírica estudia 17 fenómenos lingüísticos en un corpus oral de 20 entrevistas con castellanohablantes monolingües. El libro proporciona resultados interesantes para la investigación de la variedad lingüística de Getxo.

For the first time in the history of research both in Spanish and German linguistics, this book undertakes a comparative study of the lexical structures commonly understood as ‘word families’ and the theoretical and methodological bases of their analysis. Using the word families derived from dec(ir) and sag(en) as a main reference point, the study discusses different theoretical approaches and positions.

El presente volumen estudia – por primera vez de forma comparativa tanto en la lingüística hispánica como germánica – las estructuras léxicas denominadas tradicionalmente «familias de palabras» y las bases teórico-metodológicas de su análisis. En él se discuten los desarrollos teóricos surgidos, sobre todo pero no exclusivamente, en Alemania, España y Francia, ejemplificándolos con las familias derivadas de las raíces dec(ir) y sag(en).

This work undertakes an empirical analysis of current linguistic circumstances in the Basque Country. The two Basque subpopulations living on French and Spanish territory are compared and contrasted in terms of various parameters, including the prevalence of Basque cultural traditions and language, and related attitudes about Basque identity.

This study makes an important contribution to the theory of language change by analyzing the evolution of the French modal system from its origins in Late Latin through français classique, based on newer textual corpora and using the framework of a modal semantic approach. These developments are compared to those of other Romance languages, with the Italian modal system serving as a foil to emphasize contrast.

This study investigates the influence of medieval liturgy on the literary work of Occitan poets during the 12th and 13th centuries. It focuses on the diverse effects emanating from metrical hymn structure, sacraments, prayers, and the veneration of the saints, and additionally explores the specific impact of liturgical metaphors on the language of the troubadours.

Il presente lavoro indaga l’influenza della liturgia medievale sui componimenti dei poeti occitani (secc. XII–XIII). L’analisi mostra l’influsso, sui trovatori, della struttura metrico-melodica di inni e prosule, dei sacramenti, di formule liturgiche, di preghiere e letture bibliche, della gestualità del fedele a messa, del culto dei santi e, infine, di alcune metafore di origine liturgica, come ad esempio quella del «fuoco d’amore».

Here at last is a fully annotated critical edition of the Châteauroux text of the Chanson de Roland. Even in the Corpus edition, C was represented by a simple transcript.

The Roland Corpus edition of 2005 took Venice 7 as the base text and V7 laisses 92A and 108A were relegated to Appendix A. This obscured crucial evidence demonstrating the greater authority of C as representing the shared model and the role of V7 as modifier of that model. Close comparison of C with V7 and of both texts with the other versions disproves the Segre thesis of the anteriority of V7.

In this edition, the aim is always to provide an authentic text with minimal emendation, so as to show the salient characteristics of C, but to discuss its readings in detailed footnotes. All arguments are solidly based on textual analysis throughout and particularly in C’s repetitions and associated assonanced passages. In addition, the linguistic characteristics are studied and the historical background to C pre-1328 and its possible route from Venice to Paris between 1746 and 1792 investigated.

The earliest translations from English to French have rarely been the objects of careful study. This volume provides detailed empirical analyses of the strategies employed by French translators of early English travel reports on North America. It offers new insights on the history of translation and on aspects of the history of the English and French languages during the 16th and 17th centuries.

This synchronic study presents a new onomasiological, frame-theoretical model for the classification and interpretation of aspectual characteristics of facts. Differently from traditional approaches, that differentiate between the grammatical and lexical aspect of the verb and analyze the grammatical aspect by looking at only one language and by raising semasiological questions, this study understands aspectuality to be a content category that comprises the lexical aspect and asserts itself across the languages.

The Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman (DÉRom) presents the first attempt at etymologizing the ancestral vocabulary of the Romance languages since the publication of Meyer-Lübke’s REW. Deviating from practices commonly accepted and applied in etymological research, the DÉRom adopts a method that has so far, due to the extensive documentation of written Latin, been dismissed as being little viable for Romance Studies: the comparative analysis of grammar, used to reconstruct proto-Romance lexemes. This volume contains some 250 articles, written and revised by 40 specialists in Romance linguistics based in twelve countries, as well as a detailed presentation of the theoretical groundwork of this project.

Le DÉRom constitue la première tentative d’étymologisation du lexique héréditaire roman depuis le REW. Se détournant des pratiques reconnues en étymologie romane, le DÉRom adopte une méthode jugée jusque là peu rentable en raison du témoignage massif du latin écrit : la grammaire comparée-reconstruction. Le présent volume comporte 250 articles, précédés d’une présentation détaillée des prémisses théoriques du dictionnaire.

Communication between government authorities and immigrants is a topic of current relevance, posing difficulties for both sides. Drawing on 279 real conversations between immigrants and authorities in Berlin and Buenos Aires, this book discusses the causes of communication problems in an intercultural context and viable options for dealing with them. It is relevant for both research and practice.

This is a new critical and commented edition of the Planctus Magistrae Doloris, a vernacular old Veronese prose version of a Planctus Mariae that was copied in the second half of the 14th century. While a first transcription was published in 1891 by Gustav Oehlert, the current editor has succeeded in identifying the Latin version the vernacular text was drawn from, allowing him to clarify some difficult passages. Moreover, the author has established a stemma codicum of the three manuscripts that transmit the Latin text, illuminating the branch of the tradition on which the vernacular depends. This edition also contains a detailed linguistic commentary and glossary.

Il libro offre una nuova edizione critica e commentata del Planctus Magistrae Doloris, versione in antico volgare veronese di un Planctus Mariae, stesa nella seconda metà del XIV secolo. Mentre una prima trascrizione era stata pubblicata nel 1891 da Gustav Oehlert, il nuovo editore è riuscito a identificare il testo latino da cui il volgarizzamento discende, il che ha consentito anche di chiarirne alcuni passaggi problematici. Inoltre fornisce uno stemma codicum dei tre manoscritti che conservano il testo latino, identificando il ramo della tradizione testuale.

This analysis of German and French newspaper articles on Islam focuses not on what is stated directly, but instead on what is implied between the lines. While exposing implicit patterns of argumentation, the author explores the communicative strategies they elicit in the reader. Especially when considering a controversial and emotionally charged issue, it is worthwhile to look at underlying meaning in journalistic writing and at the ways in which it contributes to shaping a social discourse.

This volume sheds light upon one of the most emblematic constructions in Ibero-Romance: adverbial infinitives with specified subjects (e.g. al entrar Juan (Sp), para eles verem o resultado (Ptg)). The study attempts to fill an empirical gap and offers a cognitive-functional and comparative account on these constructions.
The first part provides an overview of the notions of infinitive, subject and adverbial clauses. The second part consists of two empirical case studies. First, the use of the Portuguese inflected infinitive is shown to be sensitive to factors as the mental accessibility of the infinitival subject, the syntactic-semantic autonomy of the clause, the verbal nature of the infinitive and clausal status of the construction. Second, Spanish and Portuguese infinitives with overt subjects are shown to have different properties: in Portuguese they are more complex and clause-like (having more prototypical subjects and infinitives closer to the verbal prototype), while Spanish infinitives with proper subjects have a simpler structure and are more nominal in nature.
More generally, this dissertation illustrates the flexible behaviour of the infinitive in different languages, even in two closely related languages.

El presente volumen se dedica a una de las construcciones más emblemáticas del iberorromance: los infinitivos adverbiales con sujetos explícitos, p.ej. al entrar Juan (esp), para eles verem o resultado (ptg). Desde una perspectiva cognitivo-funcional y con base en un amplio análisis empírico (de corpus y psicolingüístico), este trabajo trata de sacar en claro los factores que determinan el uso del infinitivo flexionado portugués y de infinitivos con sujetos nominativos explícitos en español y portugués.