Acceso usuarios
Arrondissement Leuven, Bélgica
This research project aims to elucidate the discrepancy between the communicative status of the Absolute Construction (AC) of the 15th century, which manifests itself as a Latin calque of an extremely formal nature, and the AC in Modern Spanish, which presents greater syntactic and semantic versatility. To this end, a corpus of (pre)classical and modern Spanish translations of Latin is compiled, in which the evolution of the AC as a form-meaning pair is examined from the methodological perspective of Diachronic Construction Grammar. By analysing the formal and semantic evolution of the AC, three successive transformations are identified: constructional change, reanalysis and actualisation. These modifications evidence the schematisation of the gerundial AC with innovative characteristics, which has moderately progressed towards Communicative Immediacy, as well as the de-schematisation of the past participial AC, which stays restricted to the extreme of the Communicative Distance pole. In addition, an in-depth examination of the linguistic context offers a more dynamic insight into functional-cognitive and typological mechanisms that drive the frequential and multifunctional expansion of the AC: priming and overlap with the gerundial free adjunct, as well as an inclination towards a greater degree of unboundedness combined with the gradual disappearance of the verb-second structure.
