Kim Schulte
Kim Schulte, M.A., M.Phil., PhD (Cantab.), FHEA, is a Reader in the Department of Translation and vice-dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Jaume I University in Castellón. He studied Modern Languages and Linguistics at the Universities of Cambridge, Salamanca and Bucharest before obtaining his PhD in Romance Linguistics from the University of Cambridge.
He has previously taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Exeter, as well as the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Since 2012, he has been teaching Linguistics and Translation in Castellón.
An important part of his research is the corpus-based diachronic study of the Romance languages, especially Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. He has worked extensively on the emergence of infinitival adverbial clauses and the evolution of modal periphrases, analysing historical corpora in order to find explanations for changes in the usage of these constructions over the centuries.
Another important area of his research is the effect of language contact on linguistic structure; he has published on contact-induced changes in the morpho-phonology and lexicon of Romanian, as well as conducting fieldwork to identify patterns of structural transfer between three Romance languages (Spanish, Catalan and Romanian) in a complex contact situation. This research also constitutes a link between language change and translation studies, as structural transfer necessarily begins with a stage of ad hoc partial translation (calquing).
Kim has spent several months as a visiting researcher in the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany), visited the Universities of Santiago de Compostela and Leipzig as Invited Lecturer, and served as external examiner for Portuguese and Spanish at the Universitiy of Portsmouth and for Romanian and Linguistics at University College London. He has participated in a number of major research projects funded by the Spanish government, as well as obtaining a 12-month Leverhulme Research Fellowship.
He has previously taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Exeter, as well as the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Since 2012, he has been teaching Linguistics and Translation in Castellón.
An important part of his research is the corpus-based diachronic study of the Romance languages, especially Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. He has worked extensively on the emergence of infinitival adverbial clauses and the evolution of modal periphrases, analysing historical corpora in order to find explanations for changes in the usage of these constructions over the centuries.
Another important area of his research is the effect of language contact on linguistic structure; he has published on contact-induced changes in the morpho-phonology and lexicon of Romanian, as well as conducting fieldwork to identify patterns of structural transfer between three Romance languages (Spanish, Catalan and Romanian) in a complex contact situation. This research also constitutes a link between language change and translation studies, as structural transfer necessarily begins with a stage of ad hoc partial translation (calquing).
Kim has spent several months as a visiting researcher in the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany), visited the Universities of Santiago de Compostela and Leipzig as Invited Lecturer, and served as external examiner for Portuguese and Spanish at the Universitiy of Portsmouth and for Romanian and Linguistics at University College London. He has participated in a number of major research projects funded by the Spanish government, as well as obtaining a 12-month Leverhulme Research Fellowship.
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These Wikipedia translation projects provide students with the opportunity to develop a number of key skills for their future profession and, simultaneously, to contribute to a project with a tangible impact on society, thereby giving them a sense of real-world achievement.
This paper, however, focuses on the next stage. i.e. what can be learnt from the subsequent treatment of these translations by the Wikipedia community. Continuous correction and improvement are an intrinsic part of the open collaboration principle (Levine & Prietula, 2014) that Wikipedia is based on, and the linguistic and stylistic amendments made to these translations by contributors from all over the world can serve as a valu-able source of feedback for students. Furthermore, an analysis of these amendments can also provide valuable insights for translation teachers, as it enables them to identify the linguistic errors and imperfections that are most likely to be considered unacceptable by members of the public. The fact that Wikipedia provides a complete history of changes to every one of its articles allows us to conduct a fine-grained assessment of the process of collaborative linguistic revision (cf. McDonough Dolmaya, 2014).
The theoretical discussion of the positive impact of this type of feedback on learning and teaching will be supported by authentic examples of articles translated by students, which will illustrate the advantages of this innovative educational method.
In addition to providing relevant sociohistorical and sociolinguistic information, the main focus lies on contact-induced structural changes, given that the structural similarity of (closely) related languages is likely to facilitate such processes.
After a brief description of the corpus and of the variationist approach and methodology chosen, a detailed analysis of the diffusion of [tener que + infinitive] at the expense of [tener de + infinitive] is presented; in addition to the exact modal value of the construction (deontic obligation/necessity, epistemic probability/certainty), a wide range of contextual factors (phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic) are examined to establish whether they have a statistically significant correlation with the choice between the two periphrases. Furthermore, combinations of more than one of these factors are identified by means of a multivariate analysis, “taking into account the simultaneous effect of all relevant independent variables” and thereby revealing the complex interplay between them.
Shortly after its emergence, in the 16th and 17th centuries, [tener que + infinitive] is, unsurprisingly, used far less frequently than its older and more established competitor [tener de + infinitive], which it will eventually go on to replace. However, even at this early stage, there are certain contexts in which [tener que + infinitive] is already the preferred option, for instance in the presence of a negative marker and with tenses other than the present indicative. Crucially, all the contexts favouring the use of the newer, less established periphrasis are comparatively infrequent, while the more common environments (no negative marker, present indicative) show more resistance to the replacement of the older, more entrenched variant. It is then shown how [tener que + infinitive] spreads from low-frequency environments in a process that is by no means uniform, as different linguistic contexts resist innovation to different degrees. This frequency effect stands in stark contrast to the way in which [tener que + infinitive] and [tener de + infinitive] have an almost equal share of the most frequent modal domain, deontic modality, at a very early stage.
In the final section of the paper, the findings regarding [tener de/que + infinitive] are compared with developments affecting the choice between two other modal constructions, [deber + infinitive] and [deber de + infinitive], showing how the combination of similar frequency effects with other processes such as reanalysis can lead to a very different outcome.
In the northern part of the Valencia region of eastern Spain, there is long-standing and relatively stable diglossic situation involving Valencian (a cover term for a range of western Catalan dialects) and Spanish, in which Spanish traditionally has had the status of the superstrate language. As a result of this diglossia, speakers incorporate a varying range of Spanish morphosyntactic features into a hybrid variety sometimes referred to as Valeñol. The clitic pronoun system of this variety, which will be analysed in this paper, is of particular interest because it contains some elements that are largely resistant to transfer (such as the presence or absence of the ‘prepositional clitics’ hi and en), whilst other features, such as the systematic morphological distinctions between human/non-human and direct/indirect object, the position of the pronoun relative to the verb, and the allomorphic variation of proclitic pronouns (e.g. //se-// vs. //es-//) have been strongly affected by the contact situation.
Subsequently, these findings are compared with the outcome of a far more recent, migration-based contact situation between Spanish/Valencian on the one hand and Romanian on the other. The emerging contact variety, sometimes jokingly referred to as Rumañol, also shows signs of grammatical hybridisation. What makes the comparison particularly interesting is that, irrespective of the differences between the contact situations, both contact varieties tend to adopt elements that do not radically ‘disrupt’ the fundamental grammatical structure of the recipient language, but rather modify the existing morphosyntactic patterns.
Though it is well known that almost anything can be borrowed between languages, the data presented in this paper supports the hypothesis that the structural predisposition of a recipient language favours the incorporation of some types of grammatical elements more than others. Rather than trying to set up a universal hierarchy of borrowability, it may therefore be more appropriate to establish a number of individual, typologically-informed borrowability scales.
Due to large-scale migration of Romanians to Castellón de la Plana over the past two decades, the incorporation of a third Romance language into a pre-existing bilingual environment (Castilian/Valencian) has led to the appearance of 'Rumañol', which combines lexical and morphosyntactic elements of the three languages. As we are dealing with recent language contact, its effects can be observed synchronically and the underlying mechanisms can be identified.
This paper analyses the relevance of individual nonce translations in the emergence of Rumañol. For first generation immigrants, this type of calque is part of the interlanguage they develop as part of the foreign language acquisition process; however, some of these structures survive in the language of the bi/trilingual second generation. As the linguistic competence of these speakers would allow them to avoid nonce translations, it stands to reason that these structures have become distinctive features of a new linguistic variety.
Castellano:
Como resultado de la migración de un elevado número de rumanos a Castellón de la Plana a lo largo de las últimas dos décadas, la incorporación de una tercera lengua románica en la situación bilingüe preexistente (castellano/valenciano) ha llevado a la aparición del llamado 'rumañol', en el que se combinan elementos léxicos y morfosintácticos de las tres lenguas. Puesto que se trata de una situación de contacto lingüístico reciente, es posible observar los efectos de este contacto de manera sincrónica e identificar los mecanismos subyacentes.
En este trabajo, se analizará la relevancia de los procesos individuales de traducción ad hoc (‘nonce translations’) en la formación del rumañol. Para la primera generación de inmigrantes, este tipo de calco constituye una parte de la interlengua que desarrollan durante el proceso de adquisición de la lengua extranjera; en la segunda generación, bi/trilingue, algunas de estas estructuras se mantienen. Dado que su grado de competencia lingüística en las dos/tres lenguas les permitiría no recurrir a la traducción ad hoc, cabe plantearse que la supervivencia de estructuras que resultan de la traducción ad hoc es atribuible al establecimiento de las mismas como rasgos definitorios de una nueva variedad lingüística.
Based on fieldwork undertaken in Castellón de la Plana, a Spanish town with a large Romanian migrant population, the present study shows that transfer between the two locally spoken Ibero-Romance varieties and Romanian is rampant at virtually all levels of linguistic description, a fact that should encourage us to be keep an open mind regarding the origin of structural similarities among related languages.
The recent influx of Romanian immigrants to Castellón de la Plana (Valencia Region, Spain) over the past 15 years has created a contact situation involving three related languages: Romanian, Castilian and Valencian. Due to their common Romance heritage, Romanian and Ibero-Romance share many basic structures as well as a related lexicon, which has facilitated the transfer of structural features between these languages, triggering the emergence new contact varieties spoken by members of the Romanian community of Castellón.
This paper presents data collected in a research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and supported by the University Jaume I in Castellón, aiming to identify patterns of morphosyntactic transfer in contact varieties of the abovementioned languages. On the one hand, members of the Romanian community have incorporated Castilian as well as Valencian features into the Romanian they speak, leading to the emergence of a new variety of Romanian, sometimes referred to as ‘rumañol’. On the other hand, second generation Romanians, who are bilingual native speakers of Castilian, use certain Romanian structures when speaking Spanish in some sociolinguistic contexts.
Ultimately, the aim of this paper is to determine the extent to which contact between Romanian, Castilian and Valencian in Castellón has led to, or is in the process of leading to, the emergence of one or several new Romance varieties that combine morphosyntactic structures from Daco- and Ibero-Romance.
Castellano:
Debido a la afluencia de un gran número de ciudadanos rumanos en Castellón de la Plana (Comunidad Valenciana, España) en los últimos 15 años, se ha desarrollado una situación de contacto lingüístico entre tres lenguas emparentadas: el rumano, el castellano y el valenciano. A causa de su legado románico compartido, el rumano y las lenguas iberorromances, además de tener una base etimológica común en gran parte de su léxico, comparten también muchas estructuras básicas, lo cual ha facilitado la transferencia de rasgos estructurales entre estas lenguas, causando la aparición de nuevas variedades de contacto en la comunidad rumana de Castellón.
En este trabajo presentamos una selección de datos recopilados en un proyecto de investigación, financiado por el Leverhulme Trust y llevado a cabo con el apoyo de la Universitat Jaume I, que tiene como objetivo identificar los patrones de transferencia morfosintáctica en las variedades de contacto en estas tres lenguas. Por un lado, los miembros de la comunidad rumana han incorporado al rumano rasgos tanto del castellano como del valenciano, lo que da lugar a una nueva variedad del rumano, el denominado “rumañol”. Por otro lado, la segunda generación de rumanos, que son bilingües, ya que también son nativos de castellano, usan ciertas estructuras rumanas al hablar castellano en determinados contextos sociolingüísticos.
En último término, el objetivo de este trabajo es determinar hasta qué punto el contacto entre el rumano, el castellano y el valenciano en Castellón ha originado, o está originando, la aparición de una o varias variedades románicas nuevas, en las que se combinan estructuras morfosintácticas de las lenguas daco e ibero-románicas.
These Wikipedia translation projects provide students with the opportunity to develop a number of key skills for their future profession and, simultaneously, to contribute to a project with a tangible impact on society, thereby giving them a sense of real-world achievement.
This paper, however, focuses on the next stage. i.e. what can be learnt from the subsequent treatment of these translations by the Wikipedia community. Continuous correction and improvement are an intrinsic part of the open collaboration principle (Levine & Prietula, 2014) that Wikipedia is based on, and the linguistic and stylistic amendments made to these translations by contributors from all over the world can serve as a valu-able source of feedback for students. Furthermore, an analysis of these amendments can also provide valuable insights for translation teachers, as it enables them to identify the linguistic errors and imperfections that are most likely to be considered unacceptable by members of the public. The fact that Wikipedia provides a complete history of changes to every one of its articles allows us to conduct a fine-grained assessment of the process of collaborative linguistic revision (cf. McDonough Dolmaya, 2014).
The theoretical discussion of the positive impact of this type of feedback on learning and teaching will be supported by authentic examples of articles translated by students, which will illustrate the advantages of this innovative educational method.
In addition to providing relevant sociohistorical and sociolinguistic information, the main focus lies on contact-induced structural changes, given that the structural similarity of (closely) related languages is likely to facilitate such processes.
After a brief description of the corpus and of the variationist approach and methodology chosen, a detailed analysis of the diffusion of [tener que + infinitive] at the expense of [tener de + infinitive] is presented; in addition to the exact modal value of the construction (deontic obligation/necessity, epistemic probability/certainty), a wide range of contextual factors (phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic) are examined to establish whether they have a statistically significant correlation with the choice between the two periphrases. Furthermore, combinations of more than one of these factors are identified by means of a multivariate analysis, “taking into account the simultaneous effect of all relevant independent variables” and thereby revealing the complex interplay between them.
Shortly after its emergence, in the 16th and 17th centuries, [tener que + infinitive] is, unsurprisingly, used far less frequently than its older and more established competitor [tener de + infinitive], which it will eventually go on to replace. However, even at this early stage, there are certain contexts in which [tener que + infinitive] is already the preferred option, for instance in the presence of a negative marker and with tenses other than the present indicative. Crucially, all the contexts favouring the use of the newer, less established periphrasis are comparatively infrequent, while the more common environments (no negative marker, present indicative) show more resistance to the replacement of the older, more entrenched variant. It is then shown how [tener que + infinitive] spreads from low-frequency environments in a process that is by no means uniform, as different linguistic contexts resist innovation to different degrees. This frequency effect stands in stark contrast to the way in which [tener que + infinitive] and [tener de + infinitive] have an almost equal share of the most frequent modal domain, deontic modality, at a very early stage.
In the final section of the paper, the findings regarding [tener de/que + infinitive] are compared with developments affecting the choice between two other modal constructions, [deber + infinitive] and [deber de + infinitive], showing how the combination of similar frequency effects with other processes such as reanalysis can lead to a very different outcome.
In the northern part of the Valencia region of eastern Spain, there is long-standing and relatively stable diglossic situation involving Valencian (a cover term for a range of western Catalan dialects) and Spanish, in which Spanish traditionally has had the status of the superstrate language. As a result of this diglossia, speakers incorporate a varying range of Spanish morphosyntactic features into a hybrid variety sometimes referred to as Valeñol. The clitic pronoun system of this variety, which will be analysed in this paper, is of particular interest because it contains some elements that are largely resistant to transfer (such as the presence or absence of the ‘prepositional clitics’ hi and en), whilst other features, such as the systematic morphological distinctions between human/non-human and direct/indirect object, the position of the pronoun relative to the verb, and the allomorphic variation of proclitic pronouns (e.g. //se-// vs. //es-//) have been strongly affected by the contact situation.
Subsequently, these findings are compared with the outcome of a far more recent, migration-based contact situation between Spanish/Valencian on the one hand and Romanian on the other. The emerging contact variety, sometimes jokingly referred to as Rumañol, also shows signs of grammatical hybridisation. What makes the comparison particularly interesting is that, irrespective of the differences between the contact situations, both contact varieties tend to adopt elements that do not radically ‘disrupt’ the fundamental grammatical structure of the recipient language, but rather modify the existing morphosyntactic patterns.
Though it is well known that almost anything can be borrowed between languages, the data presented in this paper supports the hypothesis that the structural predisposition of a recipient language favours the incorporation of some types of grammatical elements more than others. Rather than trying to set up a universal hierarchy of borrowability, it may therefore be more appropriate to establish a number of individual, typologically-informed borrowability scales.
Due to large-scale migration of Romanians to Castellón de la Plana over the past two decades, the incorporation of a third Romance language into a pre-existing bilingual environment (Castilian/Valencian) has led to the appearance of 'Rumañol', which combines lexical and morphosyntactic elements of the three languages. As we are dealing with recent language contact, its effects can be observed synchronically and the underlying mechanisms can be identified.
This paper analyses the relevance of individual nonce translations in the emergence of Rumañol. For first generation immigrants, this type of calque is part of the interlanguage they develop as part of the foreign language acquisition process; however, some of these structures survive in the language of the bi/trilingual second generation. As the linguistic competence of these speakers would allow them to avoid nonce translations, it stands to reason that these structures have become distinctive features of a new linguistic variety.
Castellano:
Como resultado de la migración de un elevado número de rumanos a Castellón de la Plana a lo largo de las últimas dos décadas, la incorporación de una tercera lengua románica en la situación bilingüe preexistente (castellano/valenciano) ha llevado a la aparición del llamado 'rumañol', en el que se combinan elementos léxicos y morfosintácticos de las tres lenguas. Puesto que se trata de una situación de contacto lingüístico reciente, es posible observar los efectos de este contacto de manera sincrónica e identificar los mecanismos subyacentes.
En este trabajo, se analizará la relevancia de los procesos individuales de traducción ad hoc (‘nonce translations’) en la formación del rumañol. Para la primera generación de inmigrantes, este tipo de calco constituye una parte de la interlengua que desarrollan durante el proceso de adquisición de la lengua extranjera; en la segunda generación, bi/trilingue, algunas de estas estructuras se mantienen. Dado que su grado de competencia lingüística en las dos/tres lenguas les permitiría no recurrir a la traducción ad hoc, cabe plantearse que la supervivencia de estructuras que resultan de la traducción ad hoc es atribuible al establecimiento de las mismas como rasgos definitorios de una nueva variedad lingüística.
Based on fieldwork undertaken in Castellón de la Plana, a Spanish town with a large Romanian migrant population, the present study shows that transfer between the two locally spoken Ibero-Romance varieties and Romanian is rampant at virtually all levels of linguistic description, a fact that should encourage us to be keep an open mind regarding the origin of structural similarities among related languages.
The recent influx of Romanian immigrants to Castellón de la Plana (Valencia Region, Spain) over the past 15 years has created a contact situation involving three related languages: Romanian, Castilian and Valencian. Due to their common Romance heritage, Romanian and Ibero-Romance share many basic structures as well as a related lexicon, which has facilitated the transfer of structural features between these languages, triggering the emergence new contact varieties spoken by members of the Romanian community of Castellón.
This paper presents data collected in a research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and supported by the University Jaume I in Castellón, aiming to identify patterns of morphosyntactic transfer in contact varieties of the abovementioned languages. On the one hand, members of the Romanian community have incorporated Castilian as well as Valencian features into the Romanian they speak, leading to the emergence of a new variety of Romanian, sometimes referred to as ‘rumañol’. On the other hand, second generation Romanians, who are bilingual native speakers of Castilian, use certain Romanian structures when speaking Spanish in some sociolinguistic contexts.
Ultimately, the aim of this paper is to determine the extent to which contact between Romanian, Castilian and Valencian in Castellón has led to, or is in the process of leading to, the emergence of one or several new Romance varieties that combine morphosyntactic structures from Daco- and Ibero-Romance.
Castellano:
Debido a la afluencia de un gran número de ciudadanos rumanos en Castellón de la Plana (Comunidad Valenciana, España) en los últimos 15 años, se ha desarrollado una situación de contacto lingüístico entre tres lenguas emparentadas: el rumano, el castellano y el valenciano. A causa de su legado románico compartido, el rumano y las lenguas iberorromances, además de tener una base etimológica común en gran parte de su léxico, comparten también muchas estructuras básicas, lo cual ha facilitado la transferencia de rasgos estructurales entre estas lenguas, causando la aparición de nuevas variedades de contacto en la comunidad rumana de Castellón.
En este trabajo presentamos una selección de datos recopilados en un proyecto de investigación, financiado por el Leverhulme Trust y llevado a cabo con el apoyo de la Universitat Jaume I, que tiene como objetivo identificar los patrones de transferencia morfosintáctica en las variedades de contacto en estas tres lenguas. Por un lado, los miembros de la comunidad rumana han incorporado al rumano rasgos tanto del castellano como del valenciano, lo que da lugar a una nueva variedad del rumano, el denominado “rumañol”. Por otro lado, la segunda generación de rumanos, que son bilingües, ya que también son nativos de castellano, usan ciertas estructuras rumanas al hablar castellano en determinados contextos sociolingüísticos.
En último término, el objetivo de este trabajo es determinar hasta qué punto el contacto entre el rumano, el castellano y el valenciano en Castellón ha originado, o está originando, la aparición de una o varias variedades románicas nuevas, en las que se combinan estructuras morfosintácticas de las lenguas daco e ibero-románicas.
Generally, a certain amount of structural information that goes beyond the visible, lexical surface is necessary for an analysis intended to provide genuine new insights. The standard solution is to annotate the corpus, either manually or semi-automatically, usually by creating a hypertext markup that supplies morpho-syntactic information for each individual word.
However, it is not always feasible to annotate a corpus, as this is a highly labour-intensive and time-consuming task. In this article, an alternative procedure that can be used for certain types of structural analysis, is proposed, explained and exemplified.
A través de esta actividad formativa, el alumnado desarrolla una serie de destrezas clave para su futura profesión, al tiempo que contribuye a un proyecto con una repercusión en la sociedad, dado que los artículos traducidos se publican en la Wikipedia en lengua inglesa. El hecho de que las traducciones serán leídas por un público global sirve como motivación para los alumnos y les da la sensación de realizar una aportación positiva al mundo real, más allá de los límites del aula.
Después de ofrecer una breve descripción del proyecto, esta ponencia se centrará en la siguiente fase, es decir, en lo que se puede aprender de la (pos)edición de los artículos por parte de los wikipedistas, la red de voluntarios que contribuyen a la Wikipedia. La corrección y mejora continua constituyen una parte intrínseca del principio de la colaboración abierta (Levine & Prietula, 2014) en el que se basa la Wikipedia, y los cambios lingüísticos y estilísticos introducidos por colaboradores en todo el mundo pueden servir como fuente de retroalimentación para el alumnado.
Además, un análisis de estos cambios permite al profesorado identificar cuáles son los errores y las imperfecciones lingüísticas más propensas a percibirse como inadmisibles por parte del público; el hecho de que la Wikipedia proporciona el historial completo de los cambios realizados en cada entrada posibilita llevar a cabo una evaluación detallada del proceso de la revisión lingüística colaborativa (cf. McDonough Dolmaya, 2014). La discusión teórica se ilustrará con ejemplos extraídos de artículos traducidos por los alumnos que han participado en el proyecto.
Referencias:
Konieczny, Piotr. 2012. “Wikis and Wikipedia as teaching tool: Five years later”, First Monday 17 (9).
Levine, Sheen S. & Michael J. Prietula. 2014. “Open collaboration for innovation: Principles and performance”, Organization Science 25(5): 1414–1433.
Martínez-Carrasco, Robert. 2017. “Wikipedia como plataforma digital de movilización de competencias: una experiencia didáctica”, in Jornada Nacional sobre Estudios Universitarios. Competencias: formación y evaluación, pp. 517–527. Castellón de la Plana: Universitat Jaume I U.P.
Martínez-Carrasco, Robert. 2018. “Using Wikipedia as a classroom tool – a translation experience” in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Higher Education Advances, HEAd’18, pp. 909–916. Universitat Politècnica de València.
McDonough Dolmaya, Julie. 2014. “Revision history: Translation trends in Wikipedia”, Translation Studies 8 (1): 16-34.
Szymczak, Piotr. 2013. “Translating Wikipedia Articles: A Preliminary Report on Authentic Translation Projects in Formal Translator Training”, Acta Philologica 44, pp. 61-70.
In a comparative case study of Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, this paper investigates how ‘prepositional infinitive’ constructions in these languages have, over time, ‘attracted’ an increasing range of different prepositional elements they can contain, thereby allowing for an overall increase in these constructions’ usage, both in terms of types and tokens. The data, obtained from detailed diachronic corpus analyses of the three languages by Schulte (2005), reveal that there is a relatively predictable, semantically-based sequential order in which different prepositions begin to participate in these constructions. For instance, the appearance of final and abessive prepositions generally predates that of temporal and concessive ones. In other words, the syntactic category of what we might call ‘infinitival prepositions’, i.e. of those prepositions that can be combined with an infinitive to form ‘prepositional infinitive’ constructions, tends to increase in a somewhat predictable fashion.
The paper goes on to identify a combination of syntactic and semantic factors which, by leading to a preference for specific usage patterns, can be shown to be responsible for the relative predictability of this development. On the one hand, there is a clear tendency for certain semantic relations between two clauses to coincide with subject coreference; on the other hand, subject coreference leads to an increased use, and eventually to the entrenchment, of the infinitival construction. These observations are further supported by cross-linguistic data from beyond the Romance domain.
Moving on to a theoretical analysis of the observed facts, it is then proposed that what superficially appears to be a single ‘prepositional infinitive’ construction within each language is perhaps better analyzed as a number of closely related, but nevertheless distinct, constructions.
References
Croft, William. 2005. ‘Logical and typological arguments for Radical Construction Grammar’, in Construction Grammars. Cognitive grounding and theoretical extensions, Jan-Ola Östma & Mirjam Fried (eds.), Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Schulte, Kim. 2005. Pragmatic causation in the rise of the Romance prepositional infinitive. A statistically-based study with special reference to Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge.
Lead researcher: José Luis Blas Arroyo
Other researchers: Margarita Porcar Miralles, Javier Vellón Lahoz, Mónica Velando Casanovas, Manuela Casanova Ávalos, Kim Schulte, Juan González Martínez.
Name of the body to which it belongs: Universitat Jaume I
Funding bodies: Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Ref. FFI2013-44614-P) and Universitat Jaume I (Ref. P1·1B2013-01).
Period: from 1-1-2014 to 30-06-2017
Summary: The research project aims to fill a void in the linguistics literature on how diverse phenomena of both linguistic variation and change have appeared in the course of the history of the Spanish language. Despite the development of Hispanic sociolinguistics in recent decades, we do not know much about how different variables being studied today were configured in this language in the past. Although historical linguistics has conclusively proven that there were different ways (variants) to put the same grammar or discursive content (linguistic variable) into words in different contexts, in most cases we do not know whether such variables are currently conditioned by the same linguistic and extralinguistic factors as in the past and, if this were the case, what their explanatory importance could be. In the same way, little is known about the rate at which changes took place from one period to another, taking into account those same conditioning factors. In this context, the project aims to be a significant contribution to fill this gap in variation studies of the Spanish language.
Another goal of this research work is to analyse how several facts in linguistic variation and change have evolved from classical Spanish to the present-day language. In this sense, it is the continuation of a previous project, funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation (2011-2013), entitled Tras las huellas de la variación en español: factores condicionantes de la variación y el cambio lingüístico a través del tiempo (Ref: FFI2010-15280) [In the footsteps of variation in Spanish: conditioning factors on linguistic variation and change over time]. In that study, we carried out a systematic study of the processes of variation and change within the paradigm of modal periphrases between the 16th and 17th centuries (see Publications).
The goal of the present undertaking is to go deeper into that line of research in order to show the sociolinguistic evolution of other syntactic variables in Spanish, such as variation within relative clauses, the (non)concordance between the existential verb haber and its argument, the presence/absence of connectors in noun clauses, and the variation of the verbal mode in some dependent clauses.
We use two corpora for the empirical work. For contemporary Spanish, we take into account the Sociolinguistic Macrocorpus of the Spanish Spoken in Castellón and its Regions (MCSCS), composed of 210 sociolinguistic interviews carried out by this research group in collaboration with the Sociolinguistics Laboratory of Universitat Jaume I. These interviews were collected from 1998 to 2005. The volume of text transcribed to date amounts to 1,324,235 words, uttered by 192 different people.
Ego-documents, close to the pole of communication immediacy, are employed for the diachronic dimension of the project. These consist mainly of private letters and, to a lesser extent, memoirs, as we consider this to be the best way to approach vernacular varieties from earlier periods. At the time of writing, the corpus contains 5,412,576 words, spoken by 3756 Spaniards from different social and dialectal backgrounds, who wrote (or dictated) these texts between the 16th and the first half of the 20th centuries.
Studies coming from this project are the result of a variationist and comparative methodology that requires various stages. First, all token variables are selected by a concordance programme (Wordsmith v.6), and those that do not fit the envelope of variation of the corresponding variable are eliminated. Next, each token is codified in an Excel file taking into account several linguistic, stylistic and social factors. Finally, for the quantitative analyses, some logistic regression programs, such as Goldvarb X and Rbrul, are applied. Their results give not only the frequency differences between the variants and their contexts, but also their statistical significance, the relative strength of factor groups and the constraint ranking within these factor groups when all of them are taken into account at the same time.
On the basis of the theoretical and methodological principles outlined above, our objectives are to answer the following questions:
Have the phenomena in morphosyntactic variability been the same over the past five centuries? And if so, have they the same distributional profiles?
Are those linguistic variables a response to identical conditioning factors or do they differ in time?
What kind of factors are they? Linguistic, stylistic, social?
At what pace do changes take place between periods?
Has normative speech on those linguistic phenomena of variation changed over time?
In this context, we start our study from the following premises, which we want to test empirically:
In none of the historical periods studied, the variation can be characterized as free or idiosyncratic, but determined by the combination of different linguistic, stylistic and social factors.
The linguistic forms that compete over time to put into words the same grammatical or functional content, work as variants of the same linguistic variable and, therefore, they can be studied according to the principles of variationism.
In the history of a language, variants gradually enter and leave the system, performing roles that previously corresponded to others and/or abandoning their distinctive traits from the past.
As a corollary of all the above, the transition period in linguistic change is not usually sudden and clear-cut. On the contrary, the change happens as a series of small adjustments through which variants compete for a prevalent position in the system.
Generally, normative prescriptions have had little influence on the spontaneously spoken language.
The main innovation introduced by the present research project is to provide the theoretical and methodological tools needed to test empirically how variation and linguistic change have occurred throughout the history of the Spanish language.
We believe that both the variationist perspective (almost unprecedented in the diachronic research of the Spanish language) and the comparative method proposed will shed light on aspects not previously covered by the analysis of grammatical variability.
The origins of the Indo-European language family are hotly disputed. Bayesian phylogenetic analyses of core vocabulary have produced conflicting results, with some supporting a farming expansion out of Anatolia ~9000 years before present (yr B.P.), while others support a spread with horse-based pastoralism out of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe ~6000 yr B.P. Here we present an extensive database of Indo-European core vocabulary that eliminates past inconsistencies in cognate coding. Ancestry-enabled phylogenetic analysis of this dataset indicates that few ancient languages are direct ancestors of modern clades and produces a root age of ~8120 yr B.P. for the family. Although this date is not consistent with the Steppe hypothesis, it does not rule out an initial homeland south of the Caucasus, with a subsequent branch northward onto the steppe and then across Europe. We reconcile this hybrid hypothesis with recently published ancient DNA evidence from the steppe and the northern Fertile Crescent.