Grammaticalization of en vías de

Abstract

The aim sought with this research is to show the process of grammaticalization experienced by the prepositional locution en vias de, originated in the prepositional phrase en via de. The study was carried out through work with diachronic and synchronic corpora which provides evidence that the history of the linguistic change occurred in en vias de has a multidimensional nature, since semantic-pragmatic, morphological, syntactic and textual factors linked by the concepts of ‘process,’ ‘progression,’ and ‘development’ interact in it. The analysis shows that four aspects impact directly on the linguistic innovation of en vias de: semantic change, which revolves around the prototypical and marginal meanings of the Latin noun vĭa; the diachronic diffusion of the prepositional locution and the contexts that it selects between the 14th and 21st centuries, which favor the routinization of prototypical collocational structures; the degree of morphological, syntactic and lexical-diatopical fixation; and finally, the texts where the prepositional locution originated and became widespread and the topics they deal with.