Viejos y nuevos valores de las preposiciones españolas

Abstract

In this article, we focus on the grammatical changes undergone by those Latin prepositions which, although phonetically changed, have survived and have even increased their functional and semantic properties throughout history. In the course of their transition to Spanish, those prepositions developed functionally as transformers for the syntactic relation of subordination among certain types of sintagms and, in some environments, they have also developed as units which transcategorise and semanticise that relation. These prepositions capability for government have also undergone changes, since some of them which used to govern a particular case, started to be governed by a series of verbs which adopted them exclusively, as a mark of their noun complementation. A series of texts from the Middle Ages have enabled us to observe these prepositions changes with respect to their Latin functions and, at the same time, to note the tendencies which have prevailed in modern Spanish: new prepositions have appeared, many cases of exchanges between prepositions and adverbs, and many cases of Latin prepositional forms have subsisted which have become lexicalised as prefixes