Prepositional Infinitives in Romance

The Author: Kim Schulte lectures in Spanish and Romance linguistics at the University of Exeter. After studying Modern Languages and Linguistics at Cambridge, he spent a year at the University of Bucharest before returning to Cambridge to undertake doctoral studies in Romance historical linguistics. In 2006, he worked as a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, investigating links between patterns of language usage and cross-linguistically common syntactic changes. His research areas include syntactic and phonological change, comparative Romance linguistics, language contact, as well as cognitive and construction grammar.

• Contents: Comparative Romance Linguistics; Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian – Historical syntax – Cognitive, usage-based approach to linguistic change – Corpus-based diachronic analyses – Infinitival constructions: distribution, usage patterns; the interface between syntax, pragmatics and semantics – Explanations for emergence and expansion of prepositional infinitive clauses.