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Project

Passive constructions in medieval and preclassical Spanish: towards a multisource analysis

This project observes the spread of the Spanish pronominal passive construction se ama (PProC) to the detriment of the periphrastic construction es amado por (PPerC) from the 15th till 19th century. We believe that the expansion of the PProC is a multiple source development in which system-related factors, verb-related factors and extra linguistic factors intervened. I.e., the main goal of this project is to track down the actualization process and to unveil the multiple sources that drive the actualization of the PProC.

As a first exploratory study, we will extract and annotate 12.000 tokens from Mark Davies’ Corpus del Español from the 15th and 16th Century, and we will analyse the mentioned factors using logistic mixed-effects regression modelling in R. This quantitative overview will provide us an objective basis to delimit our research to those factors who have proven to be relevant.

In a second step, five different DTs will be selected from the CORDE-corpus and the CODEA-corpus, from the 15th until the 20th century (literary narrative, encyclopedic texts, moral treaties, chronicles and administrative texts (both notorial and political). All five DTs favour, in some way, the appearance of passive structures. The selected tokens from these DTs will be analysed both in a quantitative and a qualitative manner in order to uncover the true nature of the diffusion of the PProC. 

Date:4 Jun 2015 →  26 Nov 2019
Keywords:syntactic variation, historical linguistics, Spanish
Disciplines:Linguistics, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Other languages and literary studies
Project type:PhD project