![]() ![]() Both construction types vary with null expression. Puerto Rican Spanish infinitives may mark subject reference with a pre-posed nominative subject pronoun ( Rivas et al. Galician inflected infinitives mark the subject referent with a suffix inflection on the infinitival form. The approach taken in this work reflects the assumption that both construction types vary in the degree to which the subject referent is expressed or referenced. What is more, the quantitative analyses suggest the disparate constructions could share a common grammaticalization pathway, providing a fresh lens through which to consider the origin of inflected infinitives in Romance. Our analysis of two underexplored constructions in two Romance languages shows that not only are the constructions more alike than dissimilar, but that also they inform quite straightforwardly lines of research central to linguistic debate regarding the nature and function of non-finite clauses as well as subject expression. It is to two instantiations of such “black sheep” that we turn our attention in the current study. The analysis of these unusual forms, then, provides fresh data to test theories of diachronic trajectories, synchronic variation, and conceivably future paths of change. Yet usage-based analyses of seemingly anomalous constructions suggest, in fact, that the same processing mechanisms which operate generally in a language can give rise, over time, to these ‘nonconforming’ linguistic units (e.g., Bybee et al. 2015), whereas non-finite clauses have been generally left outside the envelope of variation. For example, in order to determine the conditioning factors of variable subject pronominal expression in so-called pro-drop languages, previous studies have generally restricted their analyses to finite clauses (for Spanish, see Otheguy and Zentella 2012, and studies included in Carvalho et al. Often in linguistic inquiry, typologically or dialectally unusual constructions are treated as if they were outliers-ostensibly aberrant phenomena with little to contribute to general theory. As such, we propose the Puerto Rican Spanish variation may provide a new synchronic source of data with which to explore the diachronic source of (Galician) inflected infinitives. We utilize this lack of difference to propose that the two construction types may be manifestations of one grammaticalization process. We find the appearance of overt subject marking to be conditioned nearly identically across the two distinct languages as well as across finite/non-finite clauses. Using corpora of oral data, we extract 732 examples of infinitives in purpose clauses (headed by para) and employ a logistic mixed effect model to explore the linguistic conditioning of the overt/null variants. As a result, variable expression/omission of subject marking in these constructions is not yet fully understood. Both constructions, Galician inflected infinitives and (Puerto Rican) Spanish preposed, nominative infinitival subjects, have not been widely studied. This work reports the results of quantitative, variationist analyses of two typologically unusual constructions in order to explore the grammatical conditioning of subject expression in non-finite clauses.
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