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The refuge of a dying variant within the grammar: Patterns of change and continuity in the Spanish verbal periphrasis haber de + infinitive over the past two centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2015

José Luis Blas Arroyo
Affiliation:
Universitat Jaume I
Javier Vellón Lahoz
Affiliation:
Universitat Jaume I
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Abstract

Based on a corpus of ego-documents (private letters, diaries, memoirs) from the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, this paper presents a variationist comparative study to determine the fate of the modal periphrasis haber de + infinitive in the history of modern Spanish. Detailed analysis of the envelope of variation enables us to show that, despite an abrupt decline in the selection of haber de relative to tener que, both ‘to have to’, grammatical environments that favor its use remain in the mid-20th century. Many of the factor groups and the hierarchy of constraints during this period are similar to those that operated in previous periods. Nevertheless, a generalized decrease in the explanatory power of these factor groups, as well as some divergent patterns within several of these groups are also observed, mainly as a result of the fact that haber de + infinitive is increasingly relegated to some restricted areas of the grammar and lexicon. Based on these results, some theoretical implications for changing rates and constraints in language change and grammaticalization are discussed.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 
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Figure 1. Distribution of the periphrases made with auxiliary verbs haber and tener by century (%). (NB. For the sake of a more accurate comparison between the periphrases with one or the other auxiliary verb, tener que and tener de are collapsed in this graph).

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Table 1. Raw frequencies of haber de / tener de/que + infinitive by centuries in the Corpus del Español

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Table 2. Number of texts in the corpus, broken down by time and document type

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Table 3. Examples of the factors and factor groups considered in the multivariate analysis

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Figure 2. Usage frequency (%) of haber de + infinitive relative to tener que + infinitive over the 19th and 20th centuries.

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Table 4. The effect of linguistic factors on the selection of the verbal periphrasis haber de + infinitive in modal (nonfuture) contexts based on two independent variable rule analyses of the data for the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively

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Figure 3. Rate of haber de relative to tener que, broken down by sentential modalities in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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Table 5. Rate of haber de relative to tener que, broken down by grammatical person and number, in the 19th and 20th centuries

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Table 6. Distribution of the main verbs most frequently co-occurring with haber de in the 20th century corpus

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Table 7. Relative ranking of the factor groups selected as significant in the 19th and the 20th centuries