Abstract

The aim of this piece of work is to analyse the emergence of the discursive marker no obstant això ‘however’ in Catalan. This evolution allows us to emphasize that not every change in grammar should be studied from the point of view of Theory of Grammaticalization. At the same time, the grammatical history of no obstant això highlights the need to analyse the syntactic changes within the social and cultural context in which they occurred. In the case of no obstant això, a careful study of its first occurrences in Catalan shows that, far from being the result of a grammaticalization, this marker arose as a result of the grammatical loaning of a particle originating in Medieval Latin.

Abstract

The focus in this paper is on structural and functional properties of a marginal type of focus formulas in English, known as N-be-that-constructions (Schmid 2001), cf. The problem is that he is jealous. They are referred to here as focus formulas with shell nouns (FFSNs). The role of the nouns in these templates is to create conceptual shells (Schmid 1997) into which the propositional content is encapsulated, with both the parts being co-referentially linked. The BNC data have revealed two manifestations of FFSNs in discourse: they occurred either as fixed utterance-initial templates (The thing is that killing got to be a habit.), or as looser configurations, co-occurring with various discourse signposts (DSs), as in Mm. well I mean there’s the the other thing is you see… My view, inspired by Schmid (2001) and outlined in Válková and Tárnyiková (2015), is that the FFSNs can have a dual role in discourse, operating either as focalizers or as discourse signposts participating in a number of pragmatic strategies associated with facework. The aim is to argue for the validity of this claim and give evidence of and reasoning for the focality loss cases.

Abstract

Concessive connectors are the focal point of grammaticalization processes, based on several types of lexical sources. In Catalan, «jatsia» (that) is the result of a grammaticalization process based on an aspectual temporary adverb (or phase adverb), which is comparable to the process that produced «encara que». The case of «encara que» has already been studied specifically by Pérez Saldanya & Salvador (1995), while Klesper (1930), Badia (1982) and Cuenca & Massip (2005) have focused on «jatsia» (that). The interest of the study of these processes is increased in the case of «jatsia»(that) by the polymorphism it shows and by the displacement it has experimented in its use, since it has gone from being of general use in the expression of concessivity to be practically out of use. This is especially due to the fact that this displacement is not restrictive to Catalan but common to other Romance languages,and because it can correlate directly with the generalization of encara que and the appearance of the causal ja que (or later «ja...ja...» in its distributive use). And also, because of the incidence that it had in the precepts of the period and in contemporary normative coding.

Abstract

Abstract: In Modern Italian (MI), negative additives are focalizing elements that typically obey negative concord with a clausal negation or another licensing negative element. In this paper we investigate the diachronic evolution of one negative additive element, neanche ‘neither/not even’. In Old Italian (OI, Florentine variety of 1200-1370), there is no evidence of morphologically complex negative additive focalizers such as neanche. Instead, the non-negative additive counterpart of neanche, anche, could combine with a negative marker or some other negative element: e.g. né/non… anche ‘neither/not even’. We show that, in OI, (i) the morphologically non-negative additive anche can be used both as a negative and as a positive polarity item; (ii) anche can function either as an aspectual marker with the meaning ‘(not) yet’, or as an additive focalizer with the meaning ‘neither/not even’; (iii) its different interpretations are mirrored by different syntactic positions, i.e. anche has an aspectual interpretation in the postverbal position taking scope over a verbal phrase (vP), and it has an additive interpretation in the preverbal position taking scope over a determiner phrase (DP); and (iv) anche triggers a focus semantic interpretation under both conditions: as an additive and an aspectual marker (see Rooth 1985, Chierchia 2013 on focus semantics). We account for the diachronic evolution from neg(ation) + anche in OI to neanche in MI by suggesting that the grammaticalization of neanche originates from a particular construction in which the additive anche is immediately to the right adjacent to the negative disjunction né (i.e. né+anche"neanche). Key words: additive, negative additives, focus, aspectual marker, grammaticalization.