Bringing Purported Black Sheep into the Fold: Galician Inflected Infinitives and Puerto Rican Spanish Pre-Verbal Infinitival Subject Pronouns

Esther Brown,Javier Rivas

doi:10.3390/languages4020040

Abstract

This work reports the results of quantitative, variationist analyses of two typologically unusual constructions in order to explore the grammatical conditioning of subject expression in non-finite clauses. Both constructions, Galician inflected infinitives and (Puerto Rican) Spanish preposed, nominative infinitival subjects, have not been widely studied. As a result, variable expression/omission of subject marking in these constructions is not yet fully understood. Using corpora of oral data, we extract 732 examples of infinitives in purpose clauses (headed by para) and employ a logistic mixed effect model to explore the linguistic conditioning of the overt/null variants. We find the appearance of overt subject marking to be conditioned nearly identically across the two distinct languages as well as across finite/non-finite clauses. We utilize this lack of difference to propose that the two construction types may be manifestations of one grammaticalization process. As such, we propose the Puerto Rican Spanish variation may provide a new synchronic source of data with which to explore the diachronic source of (Galician) inflected infinitives.

Highlights

Often in linguistic inquiry, typologically or dialectally unusual constructions are treated as if they were outliers—ostensibly aberrant phenomena with little to contribute to general theory.For example, in order to determine the conditioning factors of variable subject pronominal expression in so-called pro-drop languages, previous studies have generally restricted their analyses to finite clauses, whereas non-finite clauses have been generally left outside the envelope of variation
For Puerto Rican Spanish, we include in the envelope of variation all the examples we find of infinitives with a null subject as well as all the examples in which the infinitive is preceded by a subject pronoun: yo ‘I’ tú/usted ‘you’, él/ella ‘he/she’, nosotros/nosotras ‘we’, ustedes ‘you, plural’ and ellos/ellas ‘they’
In Galician, the infinitival expression accounts for 89% of the para clauses and in Puerto Rican Spanish 77%

Summary

Introduction

Typologically or dialectally unusual constructions are treated as if they were outliers—ostensibly aberrant phenomena with little to contribute to general theory.For example, in order to determine the conditioning factors of variable subject pronominal expression in so-called pro-drop languages, previous studies have generally restricted their analyses to finite clauses (for Spanish, see Otheguy and Zentella 2012, and studies included in Carvalho et al 2015), whereas non-finite clauses have been generally left outside the envelope of variation. Usage-based analyses of seemingly anomalous constructions suggest, that the same processing mechanisms which operate generally in a language can give rise, over time, to these ‘nonconforming’ linguistic units (e.g., Bybee et al 2016). The analysis of these unusual forms, provides fresh data to test theories of diachronic trajectories, synchronic variation, and conceivably future paths of change. The two constructions under consideration in this work are largely underexplored The variation they present in subject reference is informed by a vast bibliography on related languages and variable phenomena.

Objectives

Results

Conclusion