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Article published In: Journal of Historical Linguistics
Vol. 8:2 (2018) ► pp.192–229

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An analysis of morphosyntactic variation in the Old Spanish future and conditional

 | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Published online: 27 December 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.17016.gra
Abstract
The presence of two forms of the future and conditional paradigms in Old Spanish is well-attested. The analytic form, which was marked by a mesoclitic, was more syntactically restricted, while the synthetic form, which surfaced with either a proclitic or an enclitic, was essentially free to appear in any syntactic context. It is notable that the analytic form was only acceptable in contexts in which finite verbs obligatorily hosted enclitics. In this article, I test various morphosyntactic factors to determine the level of variation among the analytic and synthetic future and conditional forms across six centuries of Old Spanish. The factors of verb tense, preverbal constituent, and verb stem morphology significantly affect the emergence of mesoclisis or enclisis, as does the century during which the verb is produced; however, subject expression is not a significant factor.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies
    • 2.1Company Company (1985, 2006)
    • 2.2 Company Company & Medina Urrea (1999)
  • 3.The current study
    • 3.1Methodology
    • 3.2Variables
      • 3.2.1Dependent variable: Mesoclisis/analyticity or enclisis/syntheticity
      • 3.2.2Independent factors
        • 3.2.2.1Century
        • 3.2.2.2Verb tense
        • 3.2.2.3Subject expression
        • 3.2.2.4Preverbal constituents
        • 3.2.2.5Morphological complexity
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Century
    • 4.2Verb tense
    • 4.3Subject expression
    • 4.4Preverbal constituent
    • 4.5Verbal stem morphology
    • 4.6Tense of verb over time
    • 4.7Preverbal constituents over time
    • 4.8Verbal stem morphology over time
  • 5.Discussion of results
    • 5.1Time period
    • 5.2Other factors with respect to time
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Literary sources and corpora
  • References
References (49)
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Davies, Mark. 2002–. Corpus del Español: 100 million words, 1200s–1900s. Available at [URL].
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