Tracing the development of spanish participation constructions : an empirical study of semantic change

The main aim of this thesis is to trace the development of four different constructions involving auxiliaries and participles through the history of the Spanish language. These constructions are the perfect construction expressed by haber ‘have’ + past participle (PTCP), the verbal passive expressed...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Sánchez Marco, Cristina
Tipo de recurso: tesis doctoral
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2012
País:España
Institución:CBUC, CESCA
Repositorio:TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red
OAI Identifier:oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/97044
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10803/97044
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Semàntica
Castellà
Verb
Participi
81
Descripción
Sumario:The main aim of this thesis is to trace the development of four different constructions involving auxiliaries and participles through the history of the Spanish language. These constructions are the perfect construction expressed by haber ‘have’ + past participle (PTCP), the verbal passive expressed by ser ‘be’ + PTCP, the adjectival passive expressed by estar ‘be.LOC’ + PTCP and the stative possessive expressed by tener ‘tener.POSS’ + PTCP. Specifically, in this thesis I explore changes in the interpretations of these periphrases, based both on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of corpus data. I argue that these constructions have undergone a regularization change, and that this change was mainly motivated by the competition between these participial constructions for the same interpretations. In order to test these ideas empirically, I have compiled a large diachronic corpus of Spanish from the 12th to the 20th century, consisting of more than 39 million words and composed of texts from different sources. This corpus has been automatically lemmatised and annotated with fine-grained morphosyntactic tags. In order to do this I have adapted an existing open-source linguistic analyzer (FreeLing) to allow for the efficient linguistic annotation of the oldest texts in the corpus.