On the pace of syntactic elaboration from Latin calques

Abstract

Abstract This paper addresses the auxiliation/grammaticalization of amenazar (Spanish), dreigen (Dutch), threaten (English), against the background of the competition between the vernacular languages and Latin. It shows that the subjective reading of ‘threaten’, expressing a prediction on the basis of some kind of evidence, is a Latin calque, and that the syntactic creativity or syntactic elaboration starts from this calque. In the three cases, ‘threaten’ is combined with the semantics of ‘fall’, which indicates the roofing role of Latin. The paper shows that the pace of the constructional change from ‘threaten’ + np to ‘threaten’ + inf is different from one language to another. Spanish amenazar grammaticalizes into an auxiliary during the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th century. In the case of Dutch, by contrast, only in the Golden Age of the 17th century do writers start to use dreigen ‘threaten’ as an auxiliary. Finally, English develops the auxiliary one century later than the Dutch one. The chronological differences are explained on the basis of the cultural and linguistic elaborations typical of Golden centuries, which vary from one nation to another.