Textual genre, diachrony and attitudes towards a syntactic change. <em>A por</em>plus movemente verbs

Abstract

This paper analyzes the diachrony of the Spanish prepositional construction a por, literally ‘to + for’, in a large corpus, composed of old journals, literature, grammars, and dictionaries. The corpus goes from the beginnings of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. The analysis shows that the origin and the progression of the prepositional innovation happened in the 19th century, but the generalization of the change took place in the middle of the 20th century. The paper shows that the textual genre was a decisive factor in the origin, progression and the generalization of the new structure.