Indefinites in Romance and beyond

Olga  Kellert; Sebastian  Lauschus; Malte Rosemeyer; Jan  Davatz; Elisabeth Stark; Marika Francia; Miguel Gutiérrez Maté; Andés Enrique-Arias; Guido Mensching; Martin Becker; Andrés Enrique-Arias

Indefinites in Romance and beyond

Authors

Olga Kellert (ed)

Sebastian Lauschus (ed)

Malte Rosemeyer (ed)

Synopsis

Due to their flexibility in interpretation, the use of indefinites and other quantificational expressions is highly variable and subject to dynamic processes of language change.
The present volume addresses fundamental linguistic questions about language variation and change in Romance quantificational expressions. It focuses on quantificational expressions in language varieties that have not received much attention in the previous literature, such as Old Sardinian, Argentinian Spanish, Palenquero Creole and Cabindan Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian, and others. The studies included in this volume offer new data on these processes of variation and advance theoretical discussions about language variation and change.

Chapters

Introduction

Olga Kellert, Malte Rosemeyer
Romanian niște between non-specific and specific interpretations

Jan Davatz, Elisabeth Stark
Argentinian Spanish cualunque and Italian qualunque

Marika Francia, Olga Kellert
Indefinite pronouns with THING and PERSON in two Ibero-Romance/Kikongo varieties
Palenquero Creole and Cabindan Portuguese

Miguel Gutiérrez Maté
On the diachrony of Catalan indefinite qualsevol

Olga Kellert, Andrés Enrique-Arias
Indefinites and quantifiers in Old Sardinian
A corpus based study

Guido Mensching
The Brazilian Portuguese present perfect
From nominal to verbal pluractionality

Malte Rosemeyer, Martin Becker

Introduction

Chapter 1
Romanian niște between non-specific and specific interpretations

Chapter 2
Argentinian Spanish cualunque and Italian qualunque

Chapter 3
Indefinite pronouns with THING and PERSON in two Ibero-Romance/Kikongo varieties

Chapter 4
On the diachrony of Catalan indefinite qualsevol

Chapter 5
Indefinites and quantifiers in Old Sardinian

Chapter 6
The Brazilian Portuguese present perfect

Chapter 7

Author Biographies

Olga Kellert

Olga Kellert, Ph.D. (2013), Freie Universität Berlin, habil. (2022), is a private lecturer at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. She has published on linguistic variation and change of Romance languages such as French, Spanish and Italian, Catalan and Sardinian. She is currently co-leading a project on endangered languages in Latin America and is working on Sentiment Analysis in Spanish in the ERC-funded project SALSA.

Sebastian Lauschus

Sebastian Lauschus studied Italian language and culture as well as history at the Humboldt University in Berlin (B.A.) and completed an M.A. in “European Languages: Structures and Use” at the Free University of Berlin (with a focus on Romance languages). After being the temporary replacement for Dr. Olga Kellert in the project “Quantification in Old Italian” (2019-2020), he was a research fellow at the Georg August University of Göttingen in the project “A fifteenth-century medico-botanical synonym list in Hebrew characters from central Italy”, funded by the German Research Council (DFG, 2020-2023). His research focuses on synchronic and diachronic aspects of Central and Southern Italian varieties, especially in relation to medieval and early modern times, as well as on medieval and early modern Judeo-Italian.

Malte Rosemeyer

Malte Rosemeyer is Professor of Romance Philology and Hispanic Linguistics at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His research focuses on grammatical variation and change in current and historical Romance languages (particularly Spanish, Portuguese, and French), semantic and pragmatic aspects of the interpretation of grammatical elements, and methodological issues in the analysis of corpus data and psycholinguistic experiments. His research interests lie in the disciplines of Interactional Linguistics and Usage-Based-Linguistics.