Project

Las construcciones verbales con posesivos en las variedades del español. Un estudio gramatical y sociolingüístico

Code
DOCT/011791
Duration
02 May 2018 → 20 February 2023 (Defended)
Research disciplines
  • Humanities and the arts
    • Corpus linguistics
    • Dialectology
    • Sociolinguistics
    • Syntax
Keywords
Western Europe South America Portuguese Spanish Comparative Geographic and map based Quantitative Surveys Language and text analysis Field research Contemporary Language technology Linguistics Communication
 
Project description

This dissertation compiles a series of studies on verbal constructions with possessive pronouns in Spanish dialects. In recent years, the use of possessive complements instead of prepositional ones in the Spanish verbal domain (e.g. confía mío vs confía en mí ‘(s)he trusts me’) has received increased interest among linguists, along with other emergent uses of possessives constructions beyond the nominal domain, such as the adverbial (e.g. detrás mío vs. detrás de mí ‘behind me’) and the adjectival ones (e.g. enfrente tuyo vs enfrente de ti ‘in front of you’). This phenomenon, although considered by prescriptive grammars as nonnormative, still lies within the realm of possibilities of the Spanish syntactic system. As previous accounts have shown (Malcuori 2014, Bertolotti 2014, 2017, Mare 2014, 2015), the syntactic equivalence between prepositional (de mí, de ti…) and possessive constructions (mío, tuyo…) in possessive constructions extends to other domains, such as the verbal one. This equivalence has led to a categorial reanalysis (Bertolotti 2014, 2017; cf. Elvira 2015) in which tonic possessives acquire innovative functions. While in the nominal domain these structures are encoded as modifiers of the lexical head (recuerdo {de mí, mío}), in other domains they behave as the primary complements of an adverb (detrás), an adjective (alejado), or a verb (acordarse).