Galician inflected infinitive: a variationist analysis based on oral language
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Abstract
This study reports the results of the first variationist analysis of the Galician inflected infinitive in adverbial clauses. Our objective is to unveil the probabilistic grammar of the inflected infinitive in opposition to both the uninflected infinitive and the subjunctive. Our results reveal that the usage patterns of the inflected infinitive are primarily conditioned by the degree of accessibility of the subject referent of the adverbial clause. The lower the degree of accessibility of the subject, the more likely it is for the infinitive to be inflected. Additionally, our results also suggest that the use of inflected infinitives is restricted to clauses that present a low degree of syntactic complexity. As the syntactic complexity of the clause increases, so does the likelihood for the subjunctive to occur. Our results are based on the data extracted from CORILGA, a large corpus of oral Galician of one million four hundred thousand words. We also compare the frequency of use, occurrence with an expressed subject and contexts of use of inflected infinitives in Galician and Portuguese. Our final goal is to provide new data from an under-studied language (Galician) in order to contribute to our knowledge of the inflected infinitive, an exceptional grammatical phenomenon in language.
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