Malte Rosemeyer

• PhD
• Professor at Freie Universität Berlin

Recent years have seen a growing interest in grammatical variation, a core explanandum of grammatical theory. The present volume explores questions that are fundamental to this line of research: First, the question of whether variation can always and completely be explained by intra- or extra-linguistic predictors, or whether there is a certain amo...

The Spanish discourse marker bueno, literally 'good', is a notoriously polyfunctional item that has been argued to serve several seemingly divergent functions, ranging from the expression of agreement to the expression of disagreement. It has also been observed that, as bueno frequently occurs at the beginning of reported speech, it may be grammati...

This article describes the usage of partial interrogatives without wh such as And you went…? in French and Spanish, and analyses the variation between such in-situ -Ø and in-situ-wh -interrogatives such as And you went where? On the basis of an analysis of in-situ -Ø-interrogatives in a corpus of spoken French and Spanish, these interrogatives are...

La presente charla adopta una perspectiva metodológica sobre la descripción de los cambios históricos y, en particular, la cuestión de cómo se puede modelar cambios lingüísticos que surgen en la interacción utilizando datos históricos cuantitativos. Muchas teorías del cambio semántico asumen que dichos cambios no son aleatorios, sino que surgen de...

This chapter describes the relationship between the concept of discourse traditions (DTs, cf. Koch 1997) and corpus linguistics, understood as a set of methods for studying language that relies on the use of corpora (McEnery/Hardie 2012, 1). The concept of DTs proposes that a language is shaped not just by its grammar and lexicon, but also by the c...

This paper analyses the alternation between complement clauses with and without complementizer (syndetic and asyndetic), in historical Spanish (15th-18th century). While previous studies have shown that this syntactic alternation was regulated by the degree of integration of the clauses, its stylistic distribution is understudied. In this paper we...

The Spanish future subjunctive (FS) demonstrates how linguistics can inform modern language policy. The FS is described as an archaism to be eliminated from contemporary legal texts. We analyze a corpus of over 3000 tokens of the FS in Spanish legal texts dated between the 13th and 16th century. The FS has two functions in legal discourse. The casu...

This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure. The relevance of ‘unexpected’ data taken into account in the last decades, such as the well-known case of non-focalizing cleft sentences in Germanic and Romance, has increasingly led us to give more weight to explanatio...

It is well known that Spanish futurizing morphology is frequently used not to express futurity, but instead to formulate a hypothesis, i.e. express epistemic modality. Although this is possible with both synthetic or periphrastic future marking, the synthetic future tense is more likely to express an epistemic reading than the periphrastic future....

Standard theories of focus expressed by cleft structures, for instance (Beaver & Clark 2008; Krifka 2007), assume that the motivation for the use of focus is discourse relevance: focus establishes an answer to the question under discussion (Roberts 2004: 216). This account, however, lacks a theory of how alternative sets are generated in real disco...

This paper examines a distinctive syntactic feature of (pre)classical Spanish: asyndetic complementation (without complementizer que 'that'). While many authors regard this construction as a stylistic variant which eventually declined (i.a. Girón 2005), so far no exhaustive morphosyntactic study of the phenomenon has been presented, as previous wor...

This paper analyzes the alternation between the near-synonymous French adverbials à nouveau and de nouveau ‘again’, which has received scarce attention in the literature. While previous descriptions assume that both adverbials are used to express that an eventuality is repeated, it is shown that de nouveau and à nouveau differ systematically with r...

The present paper analyzes and compares the use of clefted wh -interrogatives in spoken Madrid Spanish, Puerto Rican Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. In a first step, a typology of the discourse functions of clefted wh -interrogatives is established. This typology is partially governed by the strength of the presupposition of the proposition of th...

Many grammaticalization pathways recur across languages. A prominent explanation for this is that the properties of lexical items determine their developmental pathways. However, it is unclear why these pathways do not always occur. In this article, we ask why English did not undergo a cross-linguistically common grammaticalization pathway, finish...

Many grammaticalization pathways recur across languages. A prominent explanation for this is that the properties of lexical items determine their developmental pathways. However, it is unclear why these pathways do not always occur. In this article, we ask why English did not undergo a cross-linguistically common grammaticalization pathway, finish...

In Medieval and Early Modern Spanish, the inflectional ending-ra could be used to express both the pluperfect and modal readings (subjunctive, conditional). The use of-ra in temporal contexts was lost in Early Modern Spanish and is obsolete in Modern Spanish. Previous studies have analyzed the process of reinterpretation of-ra as a modal constructi...

Studies of language change frequently wrestle with the problem of cause and correlation. It is comparatively simple to observe a correlation between historical trends. However, it is much more difficult to demonstrate that the changes in the frequency of a construction A were indeed the cause of the changes in the frequency of a construction B. We...

Resumen Este artículo describe el desarrollo histórico de las construcciones lograr/conseguir + inf (p. ej., Pedro ha logrado ganar el premio ). Basándonos en el análisis de casi 3000 ocurrencias fechadas entre 1700 y 2005, mostramos que lograr / conseguir + inf han experimentado un proceso de construccionalización, por el cual, desde significados...

Previous studies of the historical development of partial interrogatives have postulated a change from contexts in which the proposition of the interrogative has been explicitly mentioned in the previous discourse, to contexts in which the proposition is discourse-new. The present paper explores whether the historical increase in the usage frequenc...

Previous studies on the diachrony of wh -interrogation in Brazilian Portuguese have observed a replacement process of ex-situ- wh interrogatives by cleft- wh and in-situ- wh interrogatives in the twentieth century. The present study analyzes almost 19,000 wh -interrogatives from a corpus of theater plays dated between 1800 and 2016, demonstrating t...

Este artigo enfoca as mudanças nos contextos discursivos e nas funções das interrogativas parciais in-situ no português brasileiro (PB), um tema que ainda não foi abordado por estudos prévios. À base da análise de um corpus de cerca de 200 peças de teatro datadas entre 1800 e 2016, o artigo mostra a necessidade de distinguir sobre as interrogativas...

En el español medieval y preclásico conviven, como es sabido, dos variantes que expresan el valor temporal pluscuamperfecto: la forma sintética en –ra (1) y la construcción analítica con haber en imperfecto de indicativo y un participio (2). Mientras que la primera deriva del pluscuamperfecto latino, la segunda es una innovación que fue sustituyend...

Both Madrilenian Peninsular and Caribbean Spanish use clefted wh-interrogatives (1) in order to express questions. While the constructional variation between clefted wh-interrogatives and canonical ex-situ wh-interrogatives (2) has not been intensely studied, the previous literature on the use of clefted wh-interrogatives commonly assumes that clef...

We describe the system of confirming affirmative responses in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) on the basis of a corpus of natural spoken dialogues between interlocutors that share a high degree of familiarity. While the BP response system has been characterized as an echo system (Sadock and Zwicky 1985), the unmarked option being a verb that echoes the v...

It is well known that Caribbean Spanish (EC) frequently places the subject (S) between the interrogative pronoun or adverb (Q) and the verb (V) partial interrogatives such as ¿qué tú quieres? 'what you want.PRS.2SG?'. In this EC resembles Brazilian Portuguese (PB). Previous research defends the hypothesis that the emergence of SV word order in EC i...

This study analyzes the pragmatics of in-situ wh- and complex bare wh-interrogatives such as ¿de qué? ‘of what?’ in spoken Spanish, developing a typology of their discourse functions. The interpretation of such postposed wh-interrogatives depends on inference processes by the hearer that take as cues both the degree to which the interrogative propo...

This paper explores the relationship between refunctionalization and usage frequency. In particular, it argues that (a) refunctionalization is more likely for low-frequency construction than high-frequency constructions, and that (b) high-frequency patterns are more likely candidates as models for refunctionalization processes than low-frequency pa...

This paper develops a corpus-driven analysis of wh-interrogatives in Castilian Spanish. Combining methods from variationist and interactional linguistics, I demonstrate that both the distribution of the variants and their discourse functions can be described in terms of the degree of mental accessibility of the interrogative proposition (P) and the...

Quantitative studies of language change frequently wrestle with the problem of cause and correlation. It is comparably simply to observe a correlation between historical trends such as changes in the frequency of a construction A and a construction B. However, it is much more difficult to demonstrate that the changes in the frequency of A have inde...

We describe the system of affirmative responses in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) on the basis of a corpus of natural spoken dialogues between interlocutors that share a high degree of familiarity. While the BP response system has been characterized as an echo system (Sadock and Zwicky 1985), the unmarked option being a verb that echoes the verb in the...

Portuguese and Galician are the only Romance languages whose system of positive response to polar questions has been classified as a consistent echo system (Kato and Tarrallo 1992; Urbano et al. 1993; Armstrong 2008). In Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the canonical response to a polar question is to repeat the verb of the question, as in (1). Example...

Previous studies on the diachrony of wh-interrogation in Brazilian Portuguese have observed a replacement process of ex-situ-wh interrogatives by cleft-wh and in-situ-wh interrogatives in the 20th century. The present study analyzes almost 19000 wh-interrogatives from a corpus of theater plays dated between 1800 and 2016, demonstrating that not all...

The present paper analyzes the discourse-pragmatic function of introducing Spanish qué 'what'-interrogatives with the concessive connective pero 'but'. In some contexts, a pero-preface contributes to the interpretation of the interrogative as the realization of an interactional challenge rather than a request for information (e.g. an information qu...

En este taller vamos a explorar el uso de los métodos cuantitativos en la lingüística de corpus. Vamos a discutir las ventajas y los prerrequisitos de utilizar los métodos cuantitativos y presentar algunos herramientas estadísticos útiles para la exploración de datos y la comprobación de las hipótesis: la diferencia entre frecuencia de uso absoluta...

Auxiliary verbs are known to grammaticalize from lexical verbs, but how do lexical verbs acquire verbal complements to begin with? This article provides an account of the semantic and pragmatic basis of grammaticalization of the Spanish anterior (‘perfect’) [acabar + de + infinitive] from a lexical source construction meaning finish . Based on a de...

Este volumen aborda la evolución de las principales perífrasis verbales modales del español desde sus orígenes latinos hasta la actualidad. Ocho especialistas de universidades europeas y americanas han colaborado para ofrecer un panorama general de la diacronía de estas construcciones gramaticales. Además, esta monografía proporciona reflexiones y...

Echoic affirmative responses in Brazilian Portuguese Portuguese and Galician are the only Romance languages whose system of positive response to polar questions can be classified as a consistent echo system (Urbano et al 1993; Kato & Tarallo 1992; Armstrong 2008). In Brazilian Portuguese, the canonical response to a polar question is to repeat the...

The special issue is available here: https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/opli.2018.4.issue-1/issue-files/opli.2018.4.issue-1.xml

In this paper, we demonstrate that, like frequency, morphosyntactic persistence can have a conserving effect on language change. To substantiate this claim, we analyze the alternation between the Spanish past subjunctive forms ending in –ra and –se (as in comiera and comiese ‘had eaten’). Due to the ongoing replacement of –se by –ra, persistence an...

This volume, which can be considered as a follow-up publication to Pusch & Wesch (2003), contains ten studies on verbal periphrases in a wide array of Romance languages, both in a synchronic and in a historic perspective. Thus, this collective volume addresses the Romance verbal periphrastic system as a whole. The aim of the contributions is twofol...

Auxiliary verbs are known to grammaticalize from lexical verbs, but how do lexical verbs acquire verbal complements to begin with? This article provides an account of the semantic and pragmatic basis of grammaticalization of the Spanish anterior ('perfect') acabar + de + infinitive from a lexical source construction meaning FINISH. Based on a descr...

This study applies multinomial regression analysis to a parallel corpus of Spanish medieval translations of the Bible in order to study the different factors that condition variation in the expression of possession in Old Spanish. Our methodology allows us to determine the degree to which less frequent possessive constructions (ART + POSS, as in la...

This paper compares the diachronic development of tornar(e)+a+infinitive (henceforth abbreviated RETURN+INF) constructions in Spanish, Catalan, and Italian, a topic that especially for Catalan and Italian has not received much attention. I develop and explore the hypothesis that due to their lexical origin, iterative constructions develop from a re...

Although usage-based linguistics emphasises the need for studies of language change to take frequency effects into account, there is a lack of research that tries to systematically model frequency effects and their relation to diffusion processes in language change. This monograph offers a diachronic study of the change in Spanish perfect auxiliary...

Studies of the development of compound tense auxiliary selection in Spanish frequently analyse ser ('to be') + past participle (PtP) as an anterior construction, and its disappearance as a slow replacement process starting in Old Spanish, in which the new anterior auxiliary aver ('to have') replaced it. This article investigates and rejects the emp...

Con este artículo vamos a incidir en la no siempre fácil relación entre cambio gramatical y gramaticalización. La propuesta que presentamos demuestra que algunos cambios gramaticales vienen condicionados por procesos de sustitución léxica que trascienden al ámbito gramatical, sin que quepa señalar, necesariamente, la existencia de un reanálisis en...