Abstract
American Spanish uses adverbial expressions that combine two prepositions, de and a, as exemplified in the phrase equivocarse de a feo ‘to be completely mistaken’. With just a diachronic analysis of CDH and CORDIAM corpora we are unable to identify the origin of expressions such as this, since they surface as late as the 19th century, mirroring already established spoken language. Diachronic reconstruction using observable variation in romance languages points to the existence of “lateral” diachronic development: the coincidence of American Spanish with Romanian. This allows us to conclude that this type of adverbial expression must have originated earlier in spoken Latin.
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