Borja Herce
List of John Benjamins publications in which Borja Herce is involved.
2026 Emergence and evolution of free variation in Central Pame prefixes: Sound change vs. paradigmatic structure Diachronica 43:1, pp. 74–104 | Article
Many word forms from different classes in Central Pame (cent2145, Otomanguean) allow two synonymous forms, one containing a prefix with the vowel /a/ and another one with /u/ (e.g. wa-ttsáuʔ~wu-ttsáuʔ ‘(s)he feels’). I conduct historical corpus research and elicitation to throw light on the… read more
2025 Central Pame verbal inflection: Morphological classification across layers Studies in Language 49:2, pp. 412–455 | Article
Central Pame verbal inflection constitutes a system whose organization is strikingly complex, with dozens of inflection classes distributed syntagmatically across multiple positions in a word: prefix, suffix, stem, and tone. This paper presents the first thorough description of this understudied… read more
2025 Paradigmatic complexity metrics as signals of phylogenetic relatedness: A proof of concept in Romance and Pamean diachrony Diachronica 42:1, pp. 1–46 | Article
Morphological complexity metrics like entropy, and notions like the Paradigm Cell-Filling Problem, have recently (re)gained popularity for the synchronic analysis of inflectional systems. The potential of these quantitative approaches for diachronic research, however, remains largely untapped.… read more
2022 Possessive inflection in Chichimec inalienable nouns: The morphological organization of a closed irregular class Studies in Language 46:4, pp. 901–933 | Article
Person and number of a possessor are expressed in Chichimec in one of two ways. Most nouns use possessive classifiers. A smaller class (typically inalienables) inflects for the possessor synthetically. This paper constitutes the first in-depth exploration of this latter class. These nouns are… read more
2019 Deconstructing (ir)regularity Studies in Language 43:1, pp. 44–91 | Article
Regularity and irregularity are among the most widely invoked notions in linguistics. The terms are backed up by a long and venerable tradition, and yet (or maybe therefore) different disciplines and authors seem to be using them for very different phenomena and in very different ways. The most… read more
2017 The diachrony of Spanish haber/hacer + time: A quantitative corpus-based approach to grammaticalization Journal of Historical Linguistics 7:3, pp. 276–321 | Article
Using quantitative corpus evidence from different periods, the present article analyzes the emergence and diachronic development of the Spanish time constructions (clausal and adverbial) involving contemporary hacer ‘make’ and earlier haber ‘have’. The obtained data, as well as cross-linguistic… read more
2017 Spanish time constructions with hacer : Gradient judgments and corpus data to solve a syntactic conundrum Current trends in analyzing syntactic variation, De Cuypere, Ludovic, Clara Vanderschueren and Gert de Sutter (eds.), pp. 273–300 | Article
The present work studies the grammatical properties of Spanish time constructions involving hacer ‘to make’ from an empirical, quantitative perspective with insights from both competence and language use. The results show a big difference between the properties of the so-called clausal and… read more