In The Evolution of Complex Spatial Expressions within the Romance Family, Thomas Hoelbeek offers a corpus-based historical study of a group of expressions in French and Italian. Applying a functional approach, he tackles adpositions containing the French noun travers or the Italian noun traverso, previously never analysed from a diachronic perspective.
This study enriches our knowledge of the expressions analysed and their functioning in the past, but also in present-day French and Italian, providing diachronic observations regarding functional notions put to the test. Thomas Hoelbeekâs work also contributes to a better understanding of the grammaticalisation mechanisms of complex constructions, and shows that typologically related languages may evolve differently in their ways of representing space.
All interested in the evolution of Romance languages and more specifically anyone concerned with complex expressions, spatial semantics, grammaticalisation theory and cross-linguistic analyses.