34.827, Review: Historical Linguistics, Semantics, Syntax, Portuguese, Spanish: Amaral, Delicado Cantero (2022)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-827. Fri Mar 10 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.827, Review: Historical Linguistics, Semantics, Syntax, Portuguese, Spanish: Amaral, Delicado Cantero (2022)

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Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2023 01:14:39
From: Enrico Torre [contact at enricotorre.com]
Subject: Noun-Based Constructions in the History of Portuguese and Spanish

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36871137


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-2374.html

AUTHOR: Patricia  Amaral
AUTHOR: Manuel Delicado Cantero
TITLE: Noun-Based Constructions in the History of Portuguese and Spanish
SERIES TITLE: Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Enrico Torre, Università degli Studi di Genova

SUMMARY

In their monograph, ‘Noun-based Constructions in the History of Portuguese and
Spanish,’ Patrícia Amaral and Manuel Delicado Cantero offer an empirical
diachronic investigation of three types of constructions in Spanish and
Portuguese: (i) complex determiner phrases with clausal adjunction; (ii)
complex prepositions/complementizers and complex connectives; (iii) complex
predicates containing light verbs. The goal of the book, explicitly stated in
the introduction is to address and amend three shortcomings of previous
studies: “(i) the excessive focus on the syntactic properties of determiner
phrases (DP, henceforth) at the expenses of the semantic development or the
properties of the noun in the complex construction; (ii) the tendency to
investigate each complex construction and connective in isolation, overlooking
their internal structure as well as the structural properties they share with
other constructions of the same kind; (iii) the lack of diachronic studies
investigating the nouns that are part of light verb constructions (LVC, from
now on). The book is organized into six chapters.
 
Chapter 1 is a quick overview of the contents of the book. First, the authors
illustrate the topic at hand with the aid of examples. Then, they outline the
main theoretical issues at stake: (i) the relation between categorization and
change; (ii) the role of compositionality in the history of Spanish and
Portuguese; (iii) the mechanisms of language change at large (with a special
focus on the concept of multiple causations). Next, Amaral and Delicado
Cantero outline their corpus data and data use. Finally, the authors provide a
summary of the book.

 Chapter 2 is an overview of the state of the art, which spans the last few
decades. First, the authors provide a snapshot of previous studies on
clause-taking nominals, distinguishing between nouns taking clauses and
constructions, a term used in the sense of Svenonius (2015) rather than the
Construction Grammar school (e.g., Goldberg 1995, 2006). Then, they review
current approaches to semantic and syntactic change, focusing on
language-internal mechanisms of syntactic change (with particular reference to
reanalysis and analogy), semantic change, and the consequences of syntactic
and semantic change, such as loss of compositionality and recategorization and
syntactic analyzability. Finally, they cast a glance at nouns taking finite
clauses.

 Chapter 3 tackles the phenomenon of clausal adjunction, whereby a noun takes
a subordinate clause, focusing on the syntactic and semantic changes of the
nouns involved, both independently and within the relevant constructions.
First, the authors cast a glance at the semantic literature on facts and
events, arguing that the literature has often overlooked the distinction
between the denotation of the noun “fact” and the ontological category “fact,”
which, the authors argue, do not overlap. Second, the authors outline the
situation of present-day “hecho” and “feito/facto”, the words for “fact” in
Spanish and Portuguese, respectively. It is important to outline the
difference between the words “feito” (a more vernacular term) and “facto” (a
more learned one) in contemporary Portuguese: “feito” is used to refer to work
done or memorable events; “facto”, on the other hand, is employed to refer to
happenings, situations, evidence, causes/reasons, and topics. The behavior of
the Spanish word “hecho” partly overlaps with the one and partly with the
other Portuguese correspondent regarding their syntactic behavior and
distribution. Next, Amaral and Delicado Cantero outline the historical
development of these nouns, with the aid of attested occurrences from their
corpus data. Next, they proceed to discuss the syntactic and semantic change
in light of their study. Based on their empirical observations, the authors
dispute the view that factivity is a lexical feature of these nouns, arguing
instead for a more nuanced view, according to which several linguistic and
contextual factors contribute to factive and nonfactive interpretations of the
noun and the adjunct clause over time.
 
 
Chapter 4 deals with connectives, intended as elements that link two
constituents in a sentence, DPs, or clauses and establish a semantic relation
between them. The authors first address the historical development of “sin
embargo” and “sem embargo” (‘however’) and then compare it to the diachrony of
the noun “embargo” in both languages. Based on their observations, Amaral and
Delicado Cantero claim that, having scope over a proposition, the noun
“embargo” created the syntactic conditions for the development of “sin/sem
embargo (de que)” as a connective, a development made possible by the
combinatorial possibilities of the noun “embargo”, contradicting common claims
that these constructions behave like monolithic constructions. Then, they
analyze “so pena de” / “sob pena de” (‘’) and compare it to the diachrony of
the noun “pena”. Even in this case, the authors find out that the distribution
of the noun “pena” played a crucial role in the development of the
construction, both syntactically and semantically. Based on their studies, the
authors draw the following conclusions: (i) the distributional properties of
the noun were instrumental in the creation of connectives; (ii) it is possible
to observe a reduction in nominal properties over time, yet it does not lead
to loss of syntactic analyzability; (iii) the nouns “embargo” and “pena”
underwent a similar evolution in their clause-taking properties; (iv) despite
the presence of the same lexical items, the ultimate development of these
constructions is not the same in the two languages. 

Chapter 5 addresses LVCs, focusing on the mechanisms involved in their
historical development and the level of syntactic and semantic
compositionality which can be observed over time. First, the authors review
light verbs in general and the theoretical debate concerning their supposed
structural deficiency and how the analysis of their development can shed light
on the topic. Then, they overview the literature on these constructions in the
target languages, first synchronically and then diachronically. Next, the
authors reflect on the results of their study, observing that LVCs do not seem
to show signs of recategorization and reanalysis, leading to the conclusion
that no semantic change seems to have taken place, meaning that the
constructions have remained semantically compositional and syntactically
analyzable throughout the centuries; this shows that continuity from Latin,
LVCs in Spanish and Portuguese seems to have been historically quite stable.

 Chapter 6 makes a summary of the previous chapter and draws conclusions. The
authors argue that their historically informed study supports the need for a
nuanced concept of ‘construction’ “that can account for variation within
constructions and adequately acknowledge the properties of their internal
components as they change over time” (p. 163), thus contradicting one of the
most radical tenets of constructionist approaches. Amaral and Delicado Cantero
conclude that understanding the emergence and evolution of complex
constructions sheds light on language change and compositionality and the
nature of linguistic categories (such as nouns) that may be part of these
constructions. The role of nominal elements, they claim, has been overlooked
in the relevant literature. The development of complex expressions, the
authors argue, “gains from being analyzed piece by piece, word by word.” 
 
 EVALUATION
 
 This is a very important book. By carrying out a scrupulous empirical
analysis of noun-based constructions in the history of Spanish and Portuguese,
the authors provide the linguistic community with a two-fold contribution: on
the one hand, they shed new light on the nature of these constructions; on the
other hand, they offer new insights on the historical development of the
grammar of these two closely related languages. This book will be particularly
appealing to language theoreticians as well as specialists in Ibero-American
languages. As a high-quality investigation of a hot topic in theoretical and
applied linguistics, this book fits in very well in the ‘Oxford Studies in
Diachronic and Historical Linguistics’ series, which already includes a range
of authoritative contributions such as Ledgeway (2012), Gianollo (2018) and
Allen (2019). This slim volume shows two properties that are not commonly
found in a single piece of work: conciseness and exhaustiveness. Each chapter
treats a different construction in as much detail as needed, managing to avoid
both redundancy and tediousness. Instead, every point which is made in the
book is illustrated with the aid of a fairly generous selection of carefully
chosen examples, all diligently translated into English. Discussing their
observations of corpus data against previous work on noun-based constructions
in these and other languages, the authors engage in a fruitful dialogue with
the literature to gain as much insight as possible into the topic at hand.

 The author’s discussion of the evolution of the target constructions is
outstanding, as it provides, by means of a careful analysis of corpus data,
that the relationship between constructions and their components is far from a
monolithic block. To this end, the choice to discuss a substantial number of
examples was excellent, in that it allows us to capture the complexity of the
part-whole tension. The three constructions they focus on share common
properties but also display significant differences, both synchronically and
diachronically, emphasizing that, when we talk about ‘constructions,’ we are
dealing with a wide, composite world. This observation goes in the direction
of the proposals put forward by Langlotz’s (2006) in-depth study of English
idiomatic expressions as well as some proponents of Construction Grammar who
were not skeptical about a fully holistic view of constructions (e.g., Boas
2003; Broccias 2007; Perek 2015; Torre 2017). 
 
 Another great merit of Amaral and Delicado’s volume is the discussion of the
mechanisms which are involved in language change and how a diachronic study
can help evaluate their role in the evolution of the target constructions.
While probably few linguists would nowadays deny the role of processes such as
reanalysis, recategorization, or analogy (which has made a great comeback in
mainstream linguistic theory in the last two decades, after a period of
relative neglect, especially during the heyday of Generative Grammar) in
language change, balancing their contribution in each specific case is often
less than straightforward. Consequently, embarking on a scrupulous analysis of
corpus data represents a commendable way to shed light on these mechanisms at
work. Not only does the authors’ investigation of three noun-based
constructions provides good insights into their similarities and differences
across two closely related languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese but,
perhaps even more importantly, it contributes to paving the way to further
studies along these lines.
 
 The reasons mentioned above would be enough for my evaluation of Amaral and
Delicado Cantero’s study to be extremely positive. Yet, there is another point
that I deem even more important, being extremely rare. The author's account of
their target phenomenon is free from theoretical biases, which makes this book
an even finer contribution to the study of (the diachrony of) complex
constructions and their components. Sure, a 200-page contribution cannot delve
too deeply into the study of noun-based constructions in the history of
Spanish and Portuguese, and I for one would be looking forward to a more
detailed report of their painstaking investigations. For the time being, I am
sure this slim contribution will spark great interest (and, hopefully,
fruitful debate) among historical linguists and language theorists, and will
also be well-received by specialists in Ibero-Romance languages.

REFERENCES

Allen, Cynthia L. 2019. Dative External Possessors in Early English. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Boas, Hans C. 2003. A Constructionist Approach to Resultatives. Stanford:
CSLI.

Broccias, Cristiano. 2007. The Construal of Constructions: Causal and Temporal
Interpretation in Change Constructions. Constructions 1:
http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/elanguage/constructions/article/view/19/
24.html.

Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in
Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gianollo, Chiara. 2018. Indefinites between Latin and Romance. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to
Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization
in Language. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Langlotz, Andreas. 2006. Idiomatic Creativity: A Cognitive-Linguistic Model of
Idiom-Representation and Idiom-Variation in English. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.

Ledgeway, Adam. 2012. From Latin to Romance: Microsyntactic Typology and
Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Perek, Florent. 2015. Argument Structure in Usage-based Construction Grammar:
Experimental and Corpus-based Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Svenonius, Peter. 2015. Syntactic Constructions. In T. Kiss and A. Artemis
Alexiadou (eds.), Theory and Analysis: An International Handbook, Vol. 1.
15-23. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Torre, Enrico. 2017. Concerning the Radial Network View of Argument Structure:
The Case of the English Caused-Motion Pattern. Language Sciences 66: 199-211.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Enrico Torre holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Lancaster University, UK. He is
the founder of the SIALNI event-and-contact network for the study of the
minority languages of the Iberian Peninsula (https://sialni.wixsite.com/home).
Currently, Enrico works as an adjunct in English at the University of Genoa,
Italy.





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