Over the turn of the 21st century, the use of data from large electronic corpora has changed research on Spanish historical syntax, spurring interest in long-range evolutions and the shape of the correspondent diachronic curves. However, general reflections on diffusion and the factors that drive and influence it are still pretty much lacking. In this paper, I reflect on the research possibilities laid open by the availability of such large masses of data, focusing particularly on new knowledge on syntactic (...) change brought about by the study of low-frequency phenomena and of recessive changes, as well as on the exploration of changes conditioned by dialect contact and textual traditions. I conclude with some remarks on the general typology of diffusion in syntactic change. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the overall paradigmatic distribution of gaps in the Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula. It revisits the Spanish data from a historical and comparative perspective, considering the closely related language, Portuguese. Ibero-Romance paradigm gaps are determined by the lexical rarity and the morphemic patterning. Paradigm gaps are also affected by ‘low speaker confidence’. This behaviour defines the avoidance of allomorphy even in the absence of reasonable grounds to expect the occurrence of allomorphy. Such (...) behaviour is triggered by the speaker's sensitivity to a major distributional pattern of root allomorphy in Spanish and Portuguese such as that in non-first conjunction verbs, the first person singular present indicative together with all persons and numbers of the present subjunctive in shared root allomorph. In addition to determining the defectiveness in the Ibero-Romance languages, the chapter also provides a discussion on the general domains and determinants of defectiveness. (shrink)