Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 25, Issue 1, 2001

The aim of this paper is to provide some diachronic evidence of how a language acquires primary object properties, and to shed some light on the disputable status of dative expressions (Dats) in two object constructions. Spanish having in its origin two object case-markings, one for the Acc-patient and one for the Dat-recipient, has been progressively acquiring only one object case-marking. This language would have been sliding from a DO–IO language toward a special kind of PO–SO language. This paper examines seven apparently unconnected syntactic changes, showing that a common deep pattern unifies them: a grammaticalization process which reinforces Dat object-marking as a prime argument in the history of Spanish. In various areas of the transitivity system, Dats usurped the grammatical function performed originally by the Acc. As a consequence, a fair distinction between DO and IO does not hold; there are primary object effects in this language.

Grammaticalisation studies are a potential meeting ground for theoretical linguistics and corpus-based approaches. The present paper uses evidence from the ARCHER corpus to investigate the relationship between frequency and the grammaticalisation of the get-passive. It seeks to verify whether the grammaticalisation of the passive function is reflected in an increase in the overall frequency of get, and whether grammaticalised patterns of get have spread at the expense of its lexical use. Givón/Yang (1993) have singled out several patterns that were involved in the grammaticalisation of the get-passive. Data from ARCHER are analysed to find out which of these patterns were frequent and which were of marginal importance. Finally, evidence from standard one-million-word corpora is used to test existing hypotheses on the maturation of the get-‘passive’. These data show that it has not lost its middle semantics and come closer to a true passive.

The order of gapping has repeatedly been connected with the basic word order of a language. Such a view is inadequate for free word order languages, such as Classical Greek. Classical Greek allows both right- and leftward gapping; besides, some cases of bi-directional gapping are also attested. All types of gapping can occur both with VO and with OV order. The preference for rightward gapping, rather than pointing toward a certain basic word order, appears to be connected with general properties of human processing capacities, while the order of gapping of each specific occurrence can be shown to be pragmatically motivated.