Publications

This paper analyses the alternation between complement clauses with and without complementizer (syndetic and asyndetic), in historical Spanish (15th–18th century). While previous studies have shown that this syntactic alternation was regulated by the degree of integration of the clauses, its stylistic distribution is understudied. In this paper we investigate whether the syndetic/asyndetic alternation is governed by socio-stylistic factors ...

It is well known that Spanish futurizing morphology is frequently used not to express futurity, but instead to formulate a hypothesis, i.e. express epistemic modality. Although this is possible with both synthetic or periphrastic future marking, the synthetic future tense is more likely to express an epistemic reading than the periphrastic future. This paper explores the relationship between futurizing morphology and sentence type on the basis ...

This paper examines a distinctive syntactic feature of (pre)classical Spanish: asyndetic complementation (without complementizer que 'that'). While many authors regard this construction as a stylistic variant which eventually declined (i.a. Girón 2005), so far no exhaustive morphosyntactic study of the phenomenon has been presented, as previous works either have focused on only one predicate (Blas Arroyo & Porcar Miralles 2016, 2018) or do ...

© 2018 Elsevier B.V. We describe the system of confirming affirmative responses in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) on the basis of a corpus of natural spoken dialogues between interlocutors that share a high degree of familiarity. While the BP response system has been characterized as an echo system (Sadock and Zwicky 1985), the unmarked option being a verb that echoes the verb in the antecedent utterance, our analysis reveals that this ...

In this paper, we demonstrate that, like frequency, morphosyntactic persistence can have a conserving effect on language change. To substantiate this claim, we analyze the alternation between the Spanish past subjunctive forms ending in –ra and –se (as in comiera and comiese ‘had eaten’). Due to the ongoing replacement of –se by –ra, persistence and frequency are the best predictors of the alternation in our data. First, the persistence effect ...