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Article published In: Lingvisticæ Investigationes
Vol. 40:2 (2017) ► pp.304–331

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Grammaticalization across Romance languages and the pace of language change

The position of Catalan

 | KULeuven
 | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS – IKER (UMR 5478)
Published online: 26 February 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/li.00007.lam
Abstract
Grammaticalization across Romance languages and the pace of language change. The position of Catalan.
In several works on grammaticalization, one of the authors of this paper has established a grammaticalization cline which posits three major Romance languages: French at one extreme, Spanish at the other, and Italian in between (Lamiroy, B. (1999). Auxiliaires, langues romanes et grammaticalisation. Langages, 1351, 63–75.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, (2001). Grammaticalisation et Possession inaliénable dans les langues romanes et germaniques. Zeitschrift für Französische Sprache und Literatur, Beiheft 301, 82–97.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, (2003). Grammaticalisation et comparaison de langues, Verbum, 251, 411–431.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, (2011). Degrés de grammaticalisation à travers les langues de même famille. Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, tome XIX, 167–192.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Lamiroy, B., & De Mulder, W. (2011). Degrees of Grammaticalization across Languages. In H. Narrog, & B. Heine (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization (pp. 302–317). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, De Mulder, W., & Lamiroy, B. (2012). Gradualness of grammaticalization in Romance. The position of French, Spanish and Italian. In T. Breban, L. Brems, K. Davidse, & T. Mortelmans (Eds.). New theoretical perspectives on grammaticalization and other processes of change: origins, recognition criteria and outcomes. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Van de Velde, F., & Lamiroy, B. (2017). External possessors in West Germanic and Romance: Differential speed in the drift toward NP configurationality. In H. Cuyckens, D. Van Olmen, & L. Ghesquière (Eds.), Aspects of Grammaticalization (Intersubjectification and Directionality) (pp. 353–400). Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Our purpose is to place Catalan on this cline. To achieve our goal, we use data of Catalan related to several topics, viz. auxiliaries, past tense, existential sentences, mood and demonstratives. Catalan shows contradictory evidence: whereas the grammaticalization process in certain domains suggests that it parallels Spanish and Italian, in many others, it patterns with French. Thus the hypothesis for which we provide evidence here is the following cline : French > Catalan > Italian > Spanish.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Grammaticalization phenomena in Catalan
    • 2.1Auxiliaries
      • 2.1.1Go-auxiliaries
      • 2.1.2Aspectual auxiliaries
    • 2.2Tense: the Past simple
    • 2.3Existential sentences
    • 2.4Mood
    • 2.5Demonstratives
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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