Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T11:36:11.386Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A match made in heaven: Using parallel corpora and multinomial logistic regression to analyze the expression of possession in Old Spanish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2016

Malte Rosemeyer  and
Andrés Enrique-Arias
Malte Rosemeyer
Affiliation:
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Andrés Enrique-Arias
Affiliation:
Universitat de les Illes Balears and Harvard University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study applies multinomial regression analysis to a parallel corpus of Spanish medieval translations of the Bible in order to study the different factors that condition variation in the expression of possession in Old Spanish. Our methodology allows us to determine the degree to which less frequent possessive constructions (ART + POSS, as in la su casa ‘the his house’; GEN, as in la casa de él ‘the house of him’; and ART/BARE, as in la casa ‘the house’) can be considered competitors to the dominant POSS construction (as in su casa ‘his house’) as a function of usage context differences. In comparison to the POSS construction, the ART + POSS construction usually expresses pragmatic functions such as reverence, the GEN construction is typically used to disambiguate a reference, and the ART/BARE construction is bound to contexts in which the possessor is highly accessible. Crucially, the analysis also sheds light on historical changes in the balance between structural and contextual constraints on the use of these different variants. Whereas in the 13th century, structural and stylistic constraints are almost equally important, the importance of structural constraints diminishes in the 15th century. The study thus illustrates how in reductive processes of language change, variation due to structural constraints yields to stylistic variation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , October 2016 , pp. 307 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Cameron, A. Colin, & Trivedi, Pravin K. (2010). Microeconometrics using Stata. 2nd ed. College Station: Stata Press.Google Scholar
Chappell, Hilary, & McGregor, William B. (1989). Alienability, inalienability and nominal classification. Berkeley Linguistics Society Proceedings 15:24–36.Google Scholar
Company Company, Concepción. (1994). Semántica y sintaxis de los posesivos duplicados en el español de los siglos XV y XVI. Romance Philology 48(2):111–135.Google Scholar
Company Company, Concepción (2006). Persistencia referencial, accesibilidad y tópico: La semántica de la construcción artículo + posesivo + sustantivo en el español medieval. Revista de Filologia Española 86(1):65–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Company Company, Concepción (2009). Artículo + posesivo + sustantivo y estructuras afines. In C. Company Company (ed.), Sintaxis histórica de la lengua española . Segunda parte: La frase nominal. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 759–880.Google Scholar
De Smet, Hendrik. (2012). The course of actualization. Language 88(3):601–633.Google Scholar
De Vries, Lourens. (2007). Some remarks on the use of Bible translations as parallel texts in linguistic research. In Cysow, M. & Wälchli, B. (eds.), Parallel texts: Using translational equivalents in linguistic typology. Special issue of Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung (STUF) 60:95–99.Google Scholar
Eberenz, Rolf. (2000). El español en el otoño de la Edad Media. Sobre el artículo y los pronombres. Madrid: Gredos.Google Scholar
Enrique-Arias, Andrés. (2008). Biblias romanceadas e historia de la lengua. In Company, C. Company & de Alba, J. G. Moreno (eds.), Actas del VII Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española. Madrid: Arco Libros. 1781–1794.Google Scholar
Enrique-Arias, Andrés (2009). Ventajas e inconvenientes del uso de Biblia Medieval (un corpus paralelo y alineado de textos bíblicos) para la investigación en lingüística histórica del español. In Enrique-Arias, A. (ed.), Diacronía de las lenguas iberorrománicas: Nuevas aportaciones desde la lingüística de corpus. Frankfurt: Vervuert; Madrid: Iberoamericana. 269–283.Google Scholar
Enrique-Arias, Andrés (2012a). Dos problemas en el uso de corpus diacrónicos del español: Perspectiva y comparabilidad. Scriptum Digital 1:85–106.Google Scholar
Enrique-Arias, Andrés (2012b). Lingua eorum—la lengua d'ellos: sobre la suerte de un calco sintáctico del latín en la historia del español. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 89:813–829.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Enrique-Arias, Andrés (2013). On the usefulness of using parallel texts in diachronic investigations: Insights from a parallel corpus of Spanish medieval Bible translations. In Bennett, P., Durrell, M., Scheible, S., & Whitt, R. J. (eds.), New methods in historical corpora. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. 105–115.Google Scholar
Enrique-Arias, Andrés, & Pueyo Mena, F. Javier. (2008–2016). Biblia Medieval. Available online at http:// www.bibliamedieval.es. Accessed November 26, 2014.Google Scholar
Freese, Jeremy, & Long, J. Scott. (2001). Regression models for categorical dependent variables using Stata. College Station: Stata Corporation.Google Scholar
Kaiser, Georg A. (2005). Bibelübersetzungen als Grundlage für empirische Sprachwandeluntersuchungen. In Pusch, C. D., Kabatek, J. & Raible, W. (eds.), Romance Corpus Linguistics II: Corpora and diachronic linguistics. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. 71–83.Google Scholar
Krawczak, Karolina. (2014). Shame and its near-synonyms in English: A multivariate corpus-driven approach to social emotions. In Novakova, I., Blumenthal, P., & Siepmann, D. (eds.), Emotions in discourse. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 84–94.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1982). Building on empirical foundations. In Lehmann, W. P. & Malkiel, Y. (eds.), Perspectives on historical linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 17–92.Google Scholar
Lapesa, Rafael. (2000 [1970]). Sobre el artículo ante posesivo en castellano antiguo. In Aguilar, R. Cano & Elizondo, M. T. Echenique (eds.), Estudios de morfosintaxis histórica del español. Madrid: Gredos. 413–435.Google Scholar
Lamiroy, Béatrice, & Delbecque, Nicole. (1998). The possessive dative in Romance and Germanic languages. In Van Langendonck, W. & Van Belle, W. (eds.), The dative. Vol. 2: Theoretical and contrastive studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 29–74.Google Scholar
Li, Xiaojian, Schweickert, Richard, & Gandour, Jack. (2000). The phonological similarity effect in immediate recall: Positions of shared phonemes. Memory & Cognition 28(7):1116–1125.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lyons, Christopher. (1999). Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McEnery, Tony, & Xiao, Zhonghua. (2007). Parallel and comparable corpora: The state of play. In Kawaguchi, Y., Takagaki, T., Tomimori, N., & Tsuruga, Y. (eds.), Corpus-based perspectives in linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 131–142.Google Scholar
Orme, John G., & Combs-Orme, Terri, (2009). Multiple regression with discrete dependent variables. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pountain, Christopher J. (2000). Capitalization. In Smith, J. C. & Bentley, D. (eds.), Historical linguistics 1995. Vol. 1: General issues and non-Germanic languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 295–309.Google Scholar
R Development Core Team (2015). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available at: http://www.R-project.org. Accessed September 21, 2015.Google Scholar
Ratcliff, Peter, & McKoon, Gail. (2001). A multinomial model for short-term priming in word identification. Psychological Review 108(4):835–846.Google Scholar
Ripley, Brian, & Venables, William. (2015). nnet: Software for feed-forward neural networks with a single hidden layer, and for multinomial log-linear models. R package version 7-3-11. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Rosemeyer, Malte. (2014). Auxiliary selection in Spanish: Gradience, gradualness, and conservation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sankoff, David, & Thibault, Pierrette. (1981). Weak complementarity: Tense and aspect in Montreal French. In Johns, B. B. & Strong, D. R. (eds.), Syntactic change. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. 205–216.Google Scholar
Serradilla Castaño, Ana. (2010). “Artículo + posesivo + nombre” frente a “posesivo + nombre” como variante invisible en un texto medieval. Epos 26:53–76.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali. (2006). Analysing sociolinguistic variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali (2012). Variationist sociolinguistics: Change, observation, interpretation. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Wanner, Dieter. (2005). The corpus as a key to diachronic explanation. In Kabatek, J., Pusch, C. D., & Raible, W. (eds.), Romance Corpus Linguistics II: Corpora and diachronic linguistics. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. 31–44.Google Scholar