Clara Vanderschueren – författare

This volume sheds light upon one of the most emblematic constructions in Ibero-Romance: adverbial infinitives with specified subjects (e.g. al entrar Juan (Sp), para eles verem o resultado (Ptg)). The study attempts to fill an empirical gap and offers a cognitive-functional and comparative account on these constructions.The first part provides an overview of the notions of infinitive, subject and adverbial clauses. The second part consists of two empirical case studies. First, the use of the Portuguese inflected infinitive is shown to be sensitive to factors as the mental accessibility of the infinitival subject, the syntactic-semantic autonomy of the clause, the verbal nature of the infinitive and clausal status of the construction. Second, Spanish and Portuguese infinitives with overt subjects are shown to have different properties: in Portuguese they are more complex and clause-like (having more prototypical subjects and infinitives closer to the verbal prototype), while Spanish infinitives with proper subjects have a simpler structure and are more nominal in nature. More generally, this dissertation illustrates the flexible behaviour of the infinitive in different languages, even in two closely related languages.

This book aims to provide a better understanding of convergence and non-convergence phenomena, such as divergence, from different theoretical perspectives. It brings together nine case studies that deal with contact between languages found in the Iberian Peninsula (Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese and Basque), between Spanish or Portuguese and another language (such as English), and between different varieties from Europe and other continents. The volume thus unites views from two fields that rarely interact: contact linguistics and dialectology. It discusses the mechanisms and consequences of language contact within the Ibero-Romance world, a geographical space characterised by a high rate of multilingual speakers and settings. The contributions deal with various combinations of convergence and divergence, for example between different varieties of the same language, language stability despite contact, as well as less studied aspects, such as the relation between language contact and second language acquisition, the linguistic landscape perspective of language contact, and divergence in linguistic identity construction.