Acceso usuarios
Reino Unido
The topic of this paper is the formal modelling of syntactic variation given an incremental processing (parsing/production) perspective. As a case study it investigates the syntactic variation observed in weak pronoun placement in Medieval Spanish. Weak pronouns are shown to precede and/or follow the finite verb depending on their syntactic environment. Interpolation cases, in which constituents intervene between the weak pronoun and the following verb, are also discussed and accounted for. It is argued that syntactic variation can be explained in virtue of the availability of different processing strategies i.e., different ways of building up semantic content, for one and the same natural language string. Furthermore, this paper tries to account for the diachronic changes observed in Renaissance Spanish, in which routinisation is claimed to play an important role. Additionally, processing factors are shown to contribute not only to syntactic intra-speaker variation but also to diachronic change.
