350 research outputs found
Auxiliary Selection in Old Spanish. Supplementary materials
No full textSupplementary materials to Rosemeyer, Malte (2014). Auxiliary Selection in Spanish. Gradience, Gradualness, and Conservation. Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Benjamins
Perfective auxiliation with reflexives in Medieval Romance: syntactic vs. semantic gradients
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PorThea. A historical corpus of Portuguese theater plays
No full textPorThea is a historical corpus of European and Brazilian Portuguese theater plays. The corpus consists of over 400 plays dated between 1733 and 2016, containing over 3,3 million words. Due to copyright reasons, only the metadata to the corpus is currently available. Direct access to the corpus can be requested from the author ([email protected])
Brazilian Portuguese 'in-situ wh'-interrogatives between rhetoric and change
No full textPrevious studies of the historical development of partial interrogatives have postulated a change from contexts in which the proposition of the interrogative has been explicitly mentioned in the previous discourse, to contexts in which the proposition is discourse-new. The present paper explores whether the historical increase in the usage frequency of Brazilian Portuguese 'in-situ wh'-interrogatives represents the same process. Using data from a large corpus of BP theater texts dated between the 19th and 21st century, several discourse functions of InSituWh are identified, the most frequent of which are cataphorical questions, which serve to either open up a question unrelated to the current question under discussion, or raise further questions about the current question under discussion, and rhetorical questions, which question the validity or relevance of a previously mentioned proposition. Rhetorical questions typically do not trigger a response by the interlocutor and are used with psychological verbs and morphologically simple interrogative pronouns. A statistical analysis of the diachronic distribution of InSituWh in the data reveals an increase in the usage frequency of InSituWh especially in contexts in which the proposition is discourse-new. However, the results also indicate that this increase is not due to a grammatical change of InSituWh but rather reflects a consolidation of the rhetorical question function of InSituWh within the genre of theater plays
Refunctionalization and Usage Frequency: An Exploratory Questionnaire Study
No full textThis paper explores the relationship between refunctionalization and usage frequency. In particular, it argues that (a) refunctionalization is more likely for low-frequency construction than high-frequency constructions, and that (b) high-frequency patterns are more likely candidates as models for refunctionalization processes than low-frequency patterns. It proposes that folk etymology processes be characterized as a type of refunctionalization process because in folk etymology, obsolescent and semantically void morphemes are replaced with morphemes that actually serve a function in language. This assumption allows for an empirical investigation of refunctionalization using an exploratory questionnaire study. The results indicate that usage frequency indeed plays a role in folk etymology processes, and consequently, refunctionalization. In particular, participants were more likely to accept false etymologies when the proposed etymon had a high usage frequency than when it had a low usage frequency. In summary, the present study proposes a way to study refunctionalization processes in synchrony
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