Chapter 10
Gauging expansion in synchrony
The periphrastic perfect in nineteen century Rioplatense Spanish
One of the hallmarks of present-day Rioplatense
Spanish is the highly specialised use of the periphrastic perfect or
Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto (PPC). Most
perfect nuances are instead encoded in this dialect through the
synthetic past or Pretérito Perfecto Simple (PPS).
Exploration of a novel corpus of historical media and theatre plays
shows that, in nineteenth century Rioplatense, the PPC was
productively used to encode hot news, hodiernality and hesternality.
These nineteenth century uses are in line with a cross-linguistic
perfect-to-perfective grammaticalization pathway but the path is
halted in present-day Rioplatense. We draw on cognitive
grammaticalization theory to argue that there is no determinacy in
grammaticalizing constructions: a source meaning does not uniquely
determine the path a grammaticalizing construction may take.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1Rioplatense Spanish
- 2.2The perfect
- 2.3Grammaticalization and source determination
- 2.4Micro-step expansions
- 3.Data and analysis
- 3.1
M’hijo el dotor
- 3.2Newspapers and magazines
- 3.3Abeille (1900[2005])
- 4.Discussion and conclusions
-
Abbreviations
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
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