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declined (i.a., Girón 2005), so far no exhaustive morphosyntactic study of the
phenomenon has been presented, as previous works either have focused on only one predicate (Blas Arroyo & Porcar Miralles 2016, 2018) or do not contain detailed
quantitative data (Pountain 2015). Using evidence from richly annotated corpus data
spanning between 1400 and 1799 (GITHE 2015), we adopt the diachronic probabilistic
grammar framework (Szmrecsanyi 2013) by means of multifactorial statistical models, to
identify the language-internal probabilistic constraints that regulated the que/Ø alternation, and to explore
whether their relevance changed diachronically. The results indicate that asyndetic complementation is promoted in the domain of
manipulation verbs (e.g., requests and commands) and, more generally, by the semantic and syntactic integration of events (Givón
2001a). Diachronically we observe that some of the effects strengthened over time, suggesting a syntactic specialization process,
which might have eventually led to the restricted and marked use of the asyndeton in Modern Spanish.
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2024. Bilingual clause combining: A Variable Equivalence hypothesis for conjunction choice. International Journal of Bilingualism
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2023. Beyond dynasties and binary alternations: a diachronic corpus study of four-way variability in Chinese theme-recipient constructions. Folia Linguistica
Mazzola, Giulia, Malte Rosemeyer & Bert Cornillie
2022. Syntactic alternations and socio-stylistic constraints: the case of asyndetic complementation in the history of Spanish. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 8:2 ► pp. 197 ff.
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