The quantitative results suggest that: (i) there has been a period of competition between the two structural variants with preposition and both with and (ii) the structural a en, poner meter, variability has mainly disappeared in present-day Spanish, and (iii) the evolution of the constructions with and has been quite different. poner meter The inchoative construction with displays a slight predominance of the preposition poner en in the 13th c. (4 out of 7 cases). From the 15th c. on, we observe a rapid increase in the amount of tokens with paralleled with a marginalization and eventual loss of the variants with As a, en. a consequence, in present-day Spanish the preposition has generalized as the standard a preposition with Yet, the evolution of the prepositions in the constructions with poner. meter, at the right side of Table 3, is rather different. Even in the earliest period of the corpus, the preposition is the dominant structural variant a (95.2%) with The constructions with the preposition seem to gradually expand and meter. en reach a culmination point in the 17th century, at which point examples with and are almost en a equally weighted in the corpus (en = 47.1%; = 52.9%). Thereafter, frequencies of start to a en decrease in favor of the preposition which is now used in the most widespread structural a, variant, just as with However, as opposed to what is observed with a few cases poner. poner, of the inchoativemeter construction with remain in the contemporary corpus (4.2%) (7) en (7) Siempre quise tocar el piano, pero en mi casa no había. como […] Un año después, premio, uno, que todavía está en casa de mi madre. (CORPES se metieron en comprar XXI) always wanted to play the piano, but in my house there was no piano. One year ‘I […] later, as a reward, they one (lit. one), which decided to buy they put themselves in buying is still in the house of my mother.’ Thus as far as the preposition is concerned, there was more structural variation in Medieval (13th c.-15th c.) and Classical (17th c.) Spanish. For this syntactic variability is mostly poner,
The quantitative results suggest that: (i) there has been a period of competition between the two structural variants with preposition a and en, both with poner and meter, (ii) the structural variability has mainly disappeared in present-day Spanish, and (iii) the evolution of the constructions with poner and meter has been quite different. The inchoative construction with poner displays a slight predominance of the preposition en in the 13th c. (4 out of 7 cases). From the 15th c. on, we observe a rapid increase in the amount of tokens with a, paralleled with a marginalization and eventual loss of the variants with en. As a consequence, in present-day Spanish the preposition a has generalized as the standard preposition with poner. Yet, the evolution of the prepositions in the constructions with meter, at the right side of Table 3, is rather different. Even in the earliest period of the corpus, the preposition a is the dominant structural variant (95.2%) with meter. The constructions with the preposition en seem to gradually expand and reach a culmination point in the 17th century, at which point examples with en and a are almost equally weighted in the corpus (en = 47.1%; a = 52.9%). Thereafter, frequencies of en start to decrease in favor of a, the preposition which is now used in the most widespread structural variant, just as with poner. However, as opposed to what is observed with poner, a few cases of the inchoativemeter construction with en remain in the contemporary corpus (4.2%) (7) (7) Siempre quise tocar el piano, pero en mi casa no había. […] Un año después, como premio, se metieron en comprar uno, que todavía está en casa de mi madre. (CORPES XXI) ‘I always wanted to play the piano, but in my house there was no piano. […] One year later, as a reward, they decided to buy one (lit. they put themselves in buying one), which is still in the house of my mother.’ Thus as far as the preposition is concerned, there was more structural variation in Medieval (13th c.-15th c.) and Classical (17th c.) Spanish. For poner, this syntactic variability is mostly
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