De que in Spanish: observations on the interplay

De que in Spanish: observations on the interplay between syntactic change, grammaticalization
and constructional patterns
Anton Granvik
The aim of this paper is to tell the story of de que in the history of Spanish. The data is retrieved from
the diachronic Corpus del español (Davies 2002-), ranging from the 13th to the 20th century. This story
highlights a series of semantic and syntactic changes in the prepositional element, de, in the
conjunctional element, que, and finally in the de que sequence as a whole.
For instance, de has been shown to have grammaticalized into a so called “prepositionalizer” of
compound prepositions and conjunctions (e.g. delante de ‘in front of’; see X and Author 2012, Author
2013a, 2013b, Cifuentes Honrubia 2003). The grammaticalization of de has also been proposed in the
case of dequeísmo (Sánchez Lancis 2013), where de simply accompanies the subordinate conjunction
que without overt grammatical or semantic motivation, as in creo de que es importante ‘I think (of)
that it is important to….’
On the other hand, from being the default subordinate conjunction bonne à tout in medieval Spanish
(Barra 2002), the independent use of que has been successively restrained by adding to it a range of
semantically more explicit expressions, among them different prepositions and adverbs (e.g. porque
‘because’, para que ‘in order to’, puesto que ‘since’). Also, from the 16th century on the increasing
frequency of nominal complement clauses constitute an important expansion of the use of que, which
no longer only introduces relative clauses (‘which’) with nouns, but also that-clauses (e.g. es señal
que… ‘it is a sign that’), a function que previously occupied mainly together with verbs and adjectives
(Bogard & Company 1989, Serradilla Castaño 1995, 2010).
While many of the changes affecting the de que sequence concern one of the constituent parts, the
diachronic analysis of (the uses of) de que over the centuries shows that the behavior of de que seems
to warrant it being considered a construction in and by itself, thus allowing one to talk of the
constructionalization of de que. A particular case in point is the development of the nominal
complement clause-construction, where the double function of que –introducing either a relative or a
complement clause– was disambiguated by the addition of a preposition, mainly de. In present day
Spanish, then, the de que sequence is very significantly associated with this N de que construction, i.e.
la idea de que vengas ‘the idea that you (shall) come’, apart from introducing good-old verbal
complement clauses, not to forget the infamous case of dequeísmo.
References
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