On the development of binominal quantifiers in Spanish: the notion of lexical persistence revisited
This paper questions the widespread agreement on routinization processes, and ‘desemanticization’ in particular, as a precondition to grammaticalization. In usage-based approaches, increase in (type as well as token) frequency is generally considered both the result of and a primary contributor to t...
Guardado en:
| Publicado en: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/cognitextes, |
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| Autores principales: | , |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lenguaje: | Anglais |
| Publicado: |
CogniTextes
2015
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumario: | This paper questions the widespread agreement on routinization processes, and ‘desemanticization’ in particular, as a precondition to grammaticalization. In usage-based approaches, increase in (type as well as token) frequency is generally considered both the result of and a primary contributor to the process (Bybee 2003: 605). The reasoning is as follows: since a stimulus loses its impact with repetition (habituation), increasing frequency leads to the gradual weakening of semantic force (also bleaching or generalization of meaning) and eventually to a loss of semantic transparency and compositionality, i.e. to semantic change. However, the corpus-based analysis of nine quantifying nouns in Spanish shows that these constructions not only present an irregular frequency pattern, but also undergo grammaticalization without necessarily engaging in the typical routinization processes. This paper frames the grammaticalization of binominal quantifiers in terms of ‘conceptually-driven analogy’ (Delbecque & Verveckken 2014) and while highlighting the crucial role of semantic persistence as a driving force, it shows that it is encyclopedic in scope (thus amplifying Hopper’s (1991) notion of ‘lexical persistence’). |
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