Abstract
This paper compares the diachronic development of tornar(e)+a+infinitive (henceforth abbreviated RETURN+INF) constructions in Spanish, Catalan, and Italian, a topic that especially for Catalan and Italian has not received much attention. I develop and explore the hypothesis that due to their lexical origin, iterative constructions develop from a restitutive to a repetitive function. A diachronic analysis of a corpus of RETURN+INF tokens from the three languages suggests that the grammaticalization of RETURN+INF constructions can be measured in terms of (a) actionality and (b) restructuring as mirrored in the possibility of clitic climbing. A statistical analysis using generalized linear mixed-effects regression modeling demonstrates an interplay between restructuring and the actionality of the predicates in the development of RETURN+INF constructions: the grammaticalization process affects state, achievement, and accomplishment predicates before activity predicates because activity predicates exclude a restitutive meaning. The paper thus identifies a grammaticalization path for RETURN+INF constructions common to three Romance languages that suggests a link between typological and diachronic observations. At the same time, it identifies differences in the diachronic development of these periphrases between the Ibero-Romance languages and Italian. In addition, it proposes a statistical means of assessing quantitative differences in the degree to which a verbal periphrasis is grammaticalized across related languages.
Acknowledgements
I am particularly grateful to Mar Garachana Camarero, Daniel Jacob, Ekkehard König, Scott Schwenter and Mair Parry for their extensive feedback on previous versions of this work. This work benefited from comments by the audiences at the research seminar of the Romance department at the University of Freiburg and the 47th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europeae in Poznán in 2014. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers at Linguistics for their helpful suggestions that significantly improved the paper. This study is part of the research project entitled “Diccionario histórico de las perífrasis verbales del español. Gramática, pragmática y discurso. (FFI2013-43092-P)”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology.
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