Forthcoming: 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), is a private lecturer at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. She has published on linguistic variation and change of Romance languages such as French, Spanish and Italian, Catalan and Sardinian. She is currently co-leading a project on endangered languages in Latin America and is working on Sentiment Analysis in Spanish in the ERC-funded project SALSA.

book cover

Published

July 10, 2025
LaTeX source on GitHub

Online ISSN

2943-064X

Print ISSN

2943-0550
Cite as
Kellert, Olga. Forthcoming. The (in)transparency of meaning change and variation: A study of the indefinite cualquiera in European and Argentinian Spanish. (Advances in Historical Linguistics). Berlin: Language Science Press.

License

Creative Commons License

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