Studies in Historical Linguistics and Language Change Grammaticalization, Refunctionalization and Beyond Edited by Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen and Mar Garachana Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Languages www.mdpi.com/journal/languages Studies in Historical Linguistics and Language Change Studies in Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Grammaticalization, Refunctionalization and Beyond Special Issue Editors Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen Mar Garachana MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade Special Issue Editors Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen Mar Garachana Utrecht University Barcelona University The Netherlands Spain Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Languages (ISSN 2226-471X) from 2018 to 2019 (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages/ special issues/Lingustics LanguageChange) For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Article Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-03921-576-8 (Pbk) ISBN 978-3-03921-577-5 (PDF) Cover image courtesy of Bob de Jonge. c 2019 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Contents About the Special Issue Editors ..................................... vii Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen and Mar Garachana Camarero Introduction Reprinted from: Languages 2019, 4, 34, doi:10.3390/languages4020034 ................ 1 Christopher J. Pountain The Development of the Articles in Castilian: A Functional Approach Reprinted from: Languages 2019, 4, 20, doi:10.3390/languages4020020 ................ 6 Enrique Pato Indefinite Article + Possessive + Noun in Spanish: A Case of Refunctionalization? Reprinted from: Languages 2018, 3, 44, doi:10.3390/languages3040044 ................ 23 Malte Rosemeyer Refunctionalization and Usage Frequency: An Exploratory Questionnaire Study Reprinted from: Languages 2018, 3, 39, doi:10.3390/languages3040039 ................ 31 Rolf Kailuweit Exaptation, Refunctionalization, Decapitalization—BE + Past Participle with Intransitive Verbs in Mediaeval and Early Modern Spanish Reprinted from: Languages 2018, 3, 43, doi:10.3390/languages3040043 ................ 47 Axel Hern´andez D´ıaz Refunctionalization. First-Person Plural of the Verb Haber in the History of Spanish Reprinted from: Languages 2019, 4, 6, doi:10.3390/languages4010006 ................ 59 Concepci´on Company Company Grammatical Words and Spreading of Contexts: Evidence from the Spanish Preposition a Reprinted from: Languages 2019, 4, 10, doi:10.3390/languages4010010 ................ 75 Esther Artigas On the Latin Origins of Spanish mediante Reprinted from: Languages 2019, 4, 15, doi:10.3390/languages4010015 ................ 91 Mar Garachana The History of the Spanish Preposition Mediante. Beyond the Theory of Grammaticalization Reprinted from: Languages 2019, 4, 26, doi:10.3390/languages4020026 ................109 Mar´ıa Elena Azofra Sierra The Role of Elision in Evolutionary Processes Reprinted from: Languages 2019, 4, 12, doi:10.3390/languages4010012 ................133 Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen On the History of Ante(s): Exaptation of Adverbial –s? Reprinted from: Languages 2018, 3, 45, doi:10.3390/languages3040045 ................143 v About the Special Issue Editors Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen is Associate Professor in Spanish Linguistics at Utrecht University. Her research is focused on the historical development of Spanish, especially Spanish syntax, and on variation and change in contemporary Spanish, in Spain and Spanish America. She is particularly interested in the role internal and external factors play in linguistic variation and change. To recollect her data she uses large digital language corpora and she takes a special interest in the opportunities these digital tools offer for the study of historical linguistics. She takes part in the research project Diccionario historico´ de las per´ıfrasis verbales del espanol.˜ Gramatica,´ pragmatica´ y discurso (II). Per´ıfrasis temporales y aspectuales (MINECO FFI2016-77397-P). She is a member of the research group Grup de Gramatica` i Diacronia (Gradia) recognised as ’consolidated’ by the Agencia` de Gestio´ d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR) of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR 1337). Mar Garachana is a teacher of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Barcelona. Her main research interests lie within corpus linguistics, grammaticalization and constructionalization. She has published amongst others on Spanish and Catalan discourse markers and articles evolution, on verbal periphrases constructionalization and on the change of Spanish grammar in language contact contexts. She coordinates the research project Diccionario historico´ de las per´ıfrasis verbales del espanol.˜ Gramatica,´ pragmatica´ y discurso (II). Per´ıfrasis temporales y aspectuales (MINECO FFI2016-77397-P). She also directs the research group Grup de Gramatica` i Diacronia (Gradia) recognised as ’consolidated’ by the Agencia` de Gestio´ d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR) of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR 1337). vii languages Editorial Introduction Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen 1,* and Mar Garachana Camarero 2,* 1 Faculty of Humanities, Department of Languages, Literature and Communication, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands 2 Department of Hispanic Studies, Literary Theory and Communication, University of Barcelona, 08007 Barcelona, Spain * Correspondence: [email protected] (D.N.); [email protected] (M.G.C.) Received: 6 May 2019; Accepted: 17 May 2019; Published: 4 June 2019 It is a commonly known fact that language change can be observed at different linguistic levels, which correspond to the traditional disciplines of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. In this special issue we concentrate on morphological and syntactic changes in Spanish, although we do not exclude phonological or semantic change, as long as they are linked to or relevant for the discussion of a certain morphological or syntactic evolution. Whereas grammatical change for many decades has been an important issue in the work of a number of Spanish historical linguists, the interest in this kind of change received a strong boost with the development of grammaticalization studies, which undoubtedly have greatly enhanced our knowledge of concrete linguistic evolutionary processes, as well as our understanding of the evolution of grammar in general1. Work on grammaticalization developed mainly from the late twentieth century onwards. However, it was far from being a novelty then, since various previous studies already touched upon this concept, particularly several nineteenth-century German linguists who dealt with central issues of grammaticalization studies. The term itself was coined by Meillet in 1912 (Meillet 1912), and Kuryłowicz returned to the concept and the process of grammaticalization in 1965 (Kuryłowicz 1965). A few years later, Givón (1971) elaborated further on the topic, but it was not until 1982 that the first monograph on grammaticalization was conceived by Lehmann (only published in (Lehmann 1995); for more information see Narrog and Heine 2011). Finally, the decade of the nineties meant the consolidation of grammaticalization as an approach for studying grammatical change. It provided a framework that made it possible to systemize the study of grammatical change, understood as the evolution from a lexical item or construction to a grammatical word or as the transition from a grammatical item to a more grammatical item. Unquestionably, numerous processes of grammatical change fit in this definition. However, others, such as the development of the preterite subjunctive in Spanish or the emergence of prepositions such as Old Spanish no obstante (‘in spite of’) or no embargante (‘notwithstanding’), fall outside the limits of grammaticalization proper. Therefore, alternative approaches arose in order to explain how these and other changes took place. Concepts such as exaptation, capitalization, refunctionalization and adfunctionalization emerged as a result of the need to explain certain evolutionary processes that did not match with the evolutionary patterns proposed by grammaticalization theory. For instance, it is not unusual that languages recycle grammatical material for uses different from its original etymological use. That was the case with Latin 1 As historical linguists, we concentrate on changes in the course of recorded history, not on the development of human language capacity in general. In that sense, we assume that “the historical record (all written until about a century and a half ago, when live recording began) reflects modern cognitive ability and a stable stage in the evolved human language capacity” (Traugot 2008, p. 219). Languages 2019, 4, 34; doi:10.3390/languages40200341 www.mdpi.com/journal/languages Languages 2019, 4,34 plural neuter nouns that ended in –a, whose ending in Spanish, instead of being a plural marker, came to