Subject expression and position with the verb form dize/dice ‘says’ in Spanish: a diachronic study

Abstract In contemporary Spanish, the verb decir ‘say’ presents idiosyncratic behavior regarding subject expression and position. In spoken Peninsular Spanish, decir strongly favors postverbal subjects, unlike other transitive or ditransitive verbs. The present paper focuses on the diachrony of the verb form dice / dize , tracing back the syntactic patterns in diachronic data extracted from the Corpus del Español from the 13th to the 21st century. Our aim is to elucidate whether postverbal subjects of dice/dize have become more frequent over time, or whether they rather can be considered a vestige of word order patterns that were more productive in old Spanish, as the residual V2 hypothesis predicts. The data suggest that while null subjects have become more common and postverbal subjects less common in general, this is due to the increasing use of specific constructional patterns, partly related to the frequency of syntactic operations like quotative inversion. The idiosyncratic morphosyntactic tendencies of the verb decir reflect the subject types and discourse functions of the verb that remain unchanged throughout the centuries.