Origins and development of adjectival passives in Spanish A corpus study* Cristina Marco 1 and Rafael Marín 2, 3 1 Gjøvik University College / 2 CNRS / 3 Université de Lille 3 To date, it has generally been assumed that most contemporary uses of Spanish estar ‘be.loc’ arose some time ater the use of ser ‘be’, and that the former even- tually took over most uses of the latter. Previous analyses of diachronic change in estar claim that the usage of this verb became generalized as a result of some reanalysis or grammaticalization change, presumably taking over the result state and locative uses of ser. In this paper we wish to go one step further and investigate the questions of how adjectival passive estar + participle emerged in Spanish and how it extended its usage at the expense of ser based on an empiri- cal analysis of data coming from a large corpus of Spanish texts from the 12th to the 20th century. We propose that the irst and most frequent uses of estar determined the way the participial construction emerged and further extended itself, gradually usurping uses of ser, and that the language change mechanism which drove this development was analogy. More speciically, we argue that this development was driven by the analogical relations established between parti- ciples appearing with this verb and locative prepositional phrases. Keywords: analogy, copula, language change, locative, adjectival passives doi 10.1075/ihll.5.09mar © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company * his work has been supported by a grant to the project FFI2010-15006 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Science Foundation Research Networking Programme NetWordS. We thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.