Grammaticalization across Romance languages and the pace of language change

Abstract

Abstract Grammaticalization across Romance languages and the pace of language change. The position of Catalan. In several works on grammaticalization, one of the authors of this paper has established a grammaticalization cline which posits three major Romance languages: French at one extreme, Spanish at the other, and Italian in between (Lamiroy, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2011, Lamiroy & De Mulder, 2011, De Mulder & Lamiroy, 2012, Van de Velde & Lamiroy, 2017). Our purpose is to place Catalan on this cline. To achieve our goal, we use data of Catalan related to several topics, viz. auxiliaries, past tense, existential sentences, mood and demonstratives. Catalan shows contradictory evidence: whereas the grammaticalization process in certain domains suggests that it parallels Spanish and Italian, in many others, it patterns with French. Thus the hypothesis for which we provide evidence here is the following cline : French > Catalan > Italian > Spanish.