Towards a constructionist account of Old Catalan <i>la un a l'altre</i>

Abstract

Summary: The aim of this paper is to trace, in accordance with the assumptions of Construction Grammar, how Latin reiterated reciprocal clusters came to be subsumed under la un a l’altre in Old Catalan texts (13th to 14th century). The data for conducting the analysis were selected from Corpus Informatitzat del Català Antic, comprising 240 bipartite reciprocal constructions. The shift can be traced back to two diachronic mechanisms: the loss of the relics of binary quantification and the gradual advent of articles. By means of the formal apparatus of Construction Grammar, Old Catalan is demonstrated to have had three distinct, albeit lexically related, reciprocal form-meaning pairs. They are different in that in some of them un and altre have the status of anaphorically bound elements and represent two distinct c-structure nodes, whereas in others un and altre form a single constituent. Finally, rather than conveying reciprocity proper, in sentences where it appears alongside se, la un a l’altre gains a more subjective status. All these facts lend support to the hypothesis of a gradual entrenchment and an increasingly schematic character of the medieval reciprocal sequence. [Keywords: reciprocal constructions, continuous vs. split bipartite sequence, c-structure, form-meaning pairing, binding, subjectification]