Participle and Gerundial Constructions in 16th Century Spanish: Syntactic Features and Variational Status

Abstract

This article presents, firstly, the typology of participles and gerunds in Romance languages by discussing their Latin origins within a comprehensive state of the art. The variational status of participle and gerundial constructions is also at issue in this paper, insofar it is still unclear, to what extent these structures are strategies typical of formal linguistic manifestations. Secondly, the different – and often opposed – positions scholars assume when syntactically describing absolute participle and gerundial constructions are critically pointed out. In this respect, we examine the syntactic behaviour of absolute clauses, focusing especially on two criteria: the co-presence of nominal/pronominal subject + non-finite form and the coreferentiality between the subject in the absolute clause and the subject of the main sentence. A third section aims to apply a typology of participle and gerundial constructions to a corpus containing translated and non-translated Castilian texts in prose from the 16th century. By doing this, we will show the difficulty and inconsistence of static taxonomies if the analysis is conducted from a discoursive point of view.