Bringing Purported Black Sheep into the Fold: Galician Inflected Infinitives and Puerto Rican Spanish Pre-Verbal Infinitival Subject Pronouns

Abstract

This work reports the results of quantitative, variationist analyses of two typologically unusual constructions in order to explore the grammatical conditioning of subject expression in non-finite clauses. Both constructions, Galician inflected infinitives and (Puerto Rican) Spanish preposed, nominative infinitival subjects, have not been widely studied. As a result, variable expression/omission of subject marking in these constructions is not yet fully understood. Using corpora of oral data, we extract 732 examples of infinitives in purpose clauses (headed by para) and employ a logistic mixed effect model to explore the linguistic conditioning of the overt/null variants. We find the appearance of overt subject marking to be conditioned nearly identically across the two distinct languages as well as across finite/non-finite clauses. We utilize this lack of difference to propose that the two construction types may be manifestations of one grammaticalization process. As such, we propose the Puerto Rican Spanish variation may provide a new synchronic source of data with which to explore the diachronic source of (Galician) inflected infinitives.

Mood Alternation with Adverbs of Uncertainty in Galician: A Multifactorial Analysis

“…Despite the popularity of this approach, the probabilistic grammar of Galician remains largely uncharted. Brown and Rivas (2019) and Rivas and Brown (2021) recently kicked off this line of work in Galician linguistics, focusing on inflected infinitives, a distinguishing feature of the language. Their results reveal that inflected infinitives are favored by subjects with a low degree of accessibility and clauses with a low degree of syntactic complexity, thus enriching the traditional conception of the phenomenon.…”