The Spanish ‘present participle’: lexical elaboration of a morphosyntactic gap?

Abstract

Abstract The Latin present participle in ‑nte(m) did not survive systematically in Romance. In Spanish, although a small number of forms in ‑nte may be considered inherited words, the overwhelming majority are cultured borrowings (cultismos) which hugely contributed to the elaboration of the written language; many have also diffused into everyday usage and are amongst the commonest words in the contemporary language. Such substantial cultural borrowing also paved the way for internal creations and later morphological calques from English forms in ‑ing, as a result of which forms in ‑nte are continuing to grow in both numbers and frequency. However, despite what may be seen as cultured experiments in the more systematic elaboration of a true present participle category in Spanish, forms in ‑nte came into competition with adjectives formed with the agentive suffix ‑dor, in which they were subject to restrictions of both an aspectual and pragmatic nature. This article traces the successful diffusion of ‑nte forms and suggests reasons which hindered their regaining total productivity.