Register effects and the Spanish adjectival construction sin + INF in historical corpus data

Aaron Yamada

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.147

Abstract

This study analyzes the usage of the Spanish adjectival sin + infinitive verb construction (un libro sin terminar ‘an unfinished book’) and the no + past participle construction (un libro no terminado ‘an unfinished book’) in historical corpus data, with the objective of quantitatively assessing Pountain’s (1993) analysis of the emergence of adjectival sin + INF as motivated in part by register formality. A logistic regression analysis finds that the usage of adjectival sin + INF over no + PP is significantly favored by the text register of Prose Fiction, and significantly disfavored by the register of Legal Texts. Furthermore, this preference increases with time in the register of Prose Fiction. These findings support Pountain’s claim, in showing that register effects significantly influence the usage of the novel construction. Ultimately, this study stresses the importance of measuring register effects in the analysis of language change in corpus data.

Highlights

Negation continues to generate interest in linguistic research, especially with respect to its diachrony and the role it plays in discussions of language change
Among Bosque’s arguments that sin is best analyzed as a kind of prefix in this construction, we find that (a) sin already exists as a prefix in lexical items such as sinvergüenza ‘scoundrel’ or sinrazón ‘injustice’, (b) in the adjectival sin + INF construction intervening material is not found between sin and the infinitive verb that follows as it, as in *sin siquiera secar ‘not even dried’, and (c) the infinitive verb does not take complements, as in *La botella está aún sin llenar de vino ‘The bottle is still unfilled with wine’
The results show that adjectival sin + INF was preferred to no + PP in Prose Fiction texts, which in Figure 1 we classified as being relatively more representative of informal speech patterns

Summary

Introduction

Negation continues to generate interest in linguistic research, especially with respect to its diachrony and the role it plays in discussions of language change (see Horn 1989, Hansen and Visconti 2014, Van der Auwera 2010). We measure the diachronic usage of two analytic negative adjectival constructions in Spanish: sin ‘without’ + infinitive verb (sin + INF) and no ‘no’ + past participle (no + PP). We use the Corpus diacrónico del español (CORDE) to test the proposal of Pountain (1993), who argued that the emergence of adjectival sin + INF was motivated by a predisposition for no + PP to appear in more formal linguistic registers. This paper takes a quantitative approach to the study of historical linguistics, in testing claims regarding language change using and measuring evidence found in corpus data (cf Jenset and McGillivray 2017). The adjectival sin + INF construction In Spanish, the preposition sin can be placed before an infinitive verb to create a prepositional phrase denoting the negation of a particular action, as in (1a).

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion