Probabilistic reduction and constructionalization: a usage-based diachronic account of the diffusion and conventionalization of the Spanish la de que construction

Abstract

This paper scrutinizes the conventionalization of the Spanish expression la de que ('the amount of that'), a reduced variant of la cantidad de que. The study seeks to determine the diachrony of and mechanisms underlying the emergence and diffusion of the la de que expression and whether it has conventionalized to develop into an independent form-function pairing. A Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression analysis of approximately 2000 observations of diachronic corpus data tests the influence of the conditional probability of lexemes in the noun slot and the register, which both turn out to have a meaningful effect. It is argued that the initial omission of cantidad can be accounted for by appealing to the notion of probabilistic reduction, whereby omission is feasible in contexts involving a high degree of constructional predictability. In the mapping out of change, conventionalization of the innovative la de que is most observable in contexts involving high constructional predictability and is least prominent in contexts of low constructional predictability. On the grounds that, over time, the la de que progressively has become stylistically divergent from the longer expression, the two constructions are claimed to be functionally distinct.