Syntactic and semantic change in clause-taking nominal constructions

Abstract

This chapter first provides an overview of the literature on nouns that take clauses and the distinction between eventive and result nouns, focusing on previous studies on Spanish and Portuguese. This chapter also reviews the theoretical approaches to language change that will provide the framework for our analysis in subsequent chapters. It discusses reanalysis, analogy, and the theories of semantic change that inform the data analysis. Finally, the chapter summarizes the syntactic change regarding patterns of complementation that affected clause-taking nouns in the history of Spanish and Portuguese in the 16th–17th centuries, and it identifies gaps in the knowledge of how they developed that will be addressed in the book.