The diachrony of subjective amenazar ‘threaten’: on latin-induced grammaticalization in Spanish

Bert Cornillie ^[1] ; Álvaro S. Octavio de Toledo y Huerta ^[2]
1. [1] KU Leuven
  
  KU Leuven
  
  Arrondissement Leuven, Bélgica
2. [2] Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
  
  Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
  
  Kreisfreie Stadt München, Alemania
Localización: New Directions in Grammaticalization Research / coord. por Andrew D. M. Smith, Graeme Trousdale, Richard Waltereit, 2015, ISBN 9789027259318, págs. 187-208
Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
- In the functional-linguistic literature, amenazar and other ‘threaten’ verbs have been accounted for in terms of grammaticalization and subjectification of the lexical construction/reading of amenazar + infinitive into a subjective construction/reading of amenazar + infinitive. On the basis of diachronic corpus data we show that this view does not hold: the syntactic schema of subjective amenazar + infinitive starts from a construction of the Latin verb minari ‘threaten’ with a deverbal noun. The origin of the subjective construction with amenazar and the pace of the extension of the new construction depend heavily on the contact with humanist, Latin-based discourse traditions. The proposed analysis suggests the need of revisiting earlier accounts of ‘threaten’ verbs that were based on conceptual and pragmatic criteria only.