Espejismo de la frecuencia creciente: gramaticalización y difusión del artículo ante oraciones sustantivas

Abstract

303

Two common beliefs in historical linguistics will be reviewed here: (1) that a once succesful change which is now fully integrated in the grammar must have followed a pattern of sustained growth (a “constant rate” S-curve) all along its history; and (2) that only increasing frequencies are associated with grammaticalization processes in any significant or symptomatic way. The first belief is based on the linguist’s intuitions about contemporary use, since a gramatically unsurprising phenomenon is not likely to be considered obsolescent or on the verge of abandonment. The second belief draws on an equivalence (also of intuitive nature, though observable in many particular changes) between grammaticalization as a process resulting in the emergence of processing routines and increased use of thus grammaticalized elements and constructions, a view that, albeit not necessarily wrong itself, has left in the shadows the role of failed changes in grammaticalization continua. Quantitative analysis of large amounts of data allows us to challenge both generalizations. By looking closely at the grammaticalization and diffusion of the definite article el before completives headed by que (‘that’) in Spanish, we will show that a clearly recessive phenomenon might go perfectly unnoticed to both speakers and linguists, thus revealing the potential frailty of intuition and introspective judgment as sources of access to historically conditioned grammatical facts. We will also claim that a failed evolution might in turn motivate the failure of a related (in fact, derived) construction at the far end of a grammaticalization continuum, which is tantamount to assuming that frequency drops can be both significant and symptomatic in the last stages of secondary grammaticalization, and possibly as well herald the reuse or exaptation of highly grammaticalized forms.

Keywords

Grammaticalization of articles, Completives, Frequency of use, Retraction, Exaptation, Intuitionism