Martín Fuchs and María Piñango publish paper on the cognitive forces underpinning grammaticalization paths

PhD candidate Martín Fuchs and Professor María Piñango recently published a paper in the proceedings of the last Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Their paper provides an account of the synchronic variation between the use of the Simple Present marker and the Present Progressive marker in the expression of the habitual reading in Modern Spanish. Through an acceptability judgment task, they show in three distinct dialectal varieties (Rioplatense Spanish, Iberian Spanish, and Mexican Altiplano Spanish): (a) the presence of variation across dialects, (b) that this variation is constrained by a grammaticalization path, the Progressive-to-Imperfective shift, and (c) that a generalization process is already underway in all three different dialects but at different degrees of progress: more conservative in the Rioplatense and Iberian varieties, and less so in the Mexican Altiplano one.