Vers une sémantique diachronique cognitive ? Réflexions sur l'évolution de la préposition sur

Mulder, Walter De; Vanderheyden, Anne

doi:10.1515/9783110933116.129

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“…de, em, por, para, com Romanian a, de, la, pe, în, cu a We could add here the adposition sur (Table 3), which seems to have been undergoing a process of further grammaticalization since the nineteenth century, with increasing frequency and clear semantic bleaching, especially in a few specific contexts. For instance, sur introduces the complements of a growing number of verbs (see De Mulder & Vanderheyden, 2000).…”

Section: Paradigmsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The pace of grammaticalization and the evolution of prepositional systems: Data from Romance

Fagard

Mardale

2012

Folia Linguistica

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It is generally assumed that grammaticalization is a major process in linguistic change. It is also assumed that grammaticalization does not affect homogeneously all linguistic categories, or even all languages: it has been said, for instance, that some languages are further down most grammaticalization clines than others and, thus, appear to be more grammaticalized than others. In this paper, we illustrate the uneven pace of grammaticalization in Romance by analysing a specific area of language, viz. simple and complex prepositions. Our goal is to establish a list of prepositions which are in actual use in five present-day Romance languages (to wit, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish). In order to do so, we check the validity of existing lists against written and spoken corpora, and evaluate the degree of grammaticalization of each morpheme or construction, on the basis of (mainly) morpho-syntactic criteria. Additionally, and most importantly, a corpus-based approach makes it possible to observe these items' frequency. The result offers a clear picture of the degree of grammaticalization of prepositions in present-day Romance, showing that French seems indeed to be the most grammaticalized Romance language, followed by Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian.

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Section: Paradigmsmentioning

confidence: 99%