On the Emergence of Personal Infinitives in the History of Spanish

The aim of this article is twofold: (a) To evaluate the learned source for the rise of personal infinitives in the history of Spanish, and (b) to address the issue of the origin of personal infinitives from the perspective of language acquisition. It is argued, by means of novel empirical evidence derived from the Corpus del Español, that the Latin Accusativus cum Infinitivo source is responsible for the personal infinitive in complement position in Old Castilian (in line with Pountain 1998). However, this learned source is not the source of the Modern Spanish personal infinitive in adjunct position. For the latter, an acquisitional scenario is put forward whereby changes in the primary linguistic data (cf. Lightfoot 1999) made adjunct personal infinitives possible.