The (in)transparency of meaning change and variation: A study of the indefinite cualquiera in European and Argentinian Spanish

Olga Kellert

Synopsis

This book investigates the development of indefinites like cualquiera in European and Argentinian Spanish, tracing their path from modal meanings like free choice and random selection to evaluative and even pejorative uses. Drawing on corpus data, variation across dialects, and formal semantic tools, the study probes how transparent these shifts are and what they reveal about the mechanisms of meaning change. The findings will interest linguists working on indefinites, variation, or the interface between form and interpretation—whether in synchrony or diachrony.

Author Biography

Olga Kellert

Olga Kellert, Ph.D. (2013), Freie Universität Berlin, habil. (2022), was a private lecturer at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and is now Associate Professor at Arizona State University (USA). She has published on linguistic variation and change of Romance languages such as French, Spanish and Italian, Catalan and Sardinian. She is currently working on NLP for endangered languages in Latin America and on Sentiment Analysis in Spanish (varieties).

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Published

January 3, 2026
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Advances in Historical Linguistics

Online ISSN

2943-064X

Print ISSN

2943-0550
Cite as
Kellert, Olga. 2026. The (in)transparency of meaning change and variation: A study of the indefinite cualquiera in European and Argentinian Spanish. (Advances in Historical Linguistics 2). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15847087
Copyright (c) 2025 Olga Kellert

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Details about the available publication format: PDF

PDF

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-533-5

doi

10.5281/zenodo.15847087

Details about the available publication format: Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-98554-153-9

Physical Dimensions

180mm x 245mm