This is a very important book. By carrying out a scrupulous empirical analysis of noun-based constructions in the history of Spanish and Portuguese, the authors provide the linguistic community with a two-fold contribution: on the one hand, they shed new light on the nature of these constructions; on the other hand, they offer new insights on the historical development of the grammar of these two closely related languages. This book will be particularly appealing to
language theoreticians as well as specialists in Ibero-American languages [...] I am sure this slim contribution will spark great interest (and, hopefully, fruitful debate) among historical linguists and language theorists, and will also be well-received by specialists in Ibero-Romance languages.
Patrícia Amaral is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, where she is also affiliated with Linguistics and Cognitive Science. She obtained her PhD from The Ohio State University in 2007 and has held appointments at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Liverpool, and Stanford University. Her current research focuses on syntactic and semantic change in Portuguese and Spanish, and she
has also published more broadly in the fields of Romance linguistics, semantics, and experimental pragmatics. She is the co-editor of Portuguese/Spanish Interfaces: Diachrony, Synchrony, and Contact (Benjamins, 2014).
Manuel Delicado Cantero is Senior Lecturer in the Spanish program in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the Australian National University. His research areas include Spanish and Romance syntax and historical linguistics, with particular focus on the syntactic evolution of (finite) clauses introduced by prepositions, dialect syntax, and clausal nominalization in Spanish and other Romance languages. He has also published on the teaching and learning of L2 Spanish
pronunciation in Australia. He is the author of Prepositional Clauses in Spanish: A Diachronic and Comparative Syntactic Study (De Gruyter, 2013).