We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
From verum to epistemic modality and evidentiality: On the emergence of the Spanish Adv+C construction.
- Authors
Kocher, Anna
- Abstract
In this article, I investigate the diachronic development of a construction in Modern Spanish. It consists of an epistemic or evidential modifier followed by the complementizer (hence Adv+C) that heads root clauses (SeguroAdv queC viene 'Surely he/she will come'). I demonstrate that the distributional, semantic, and pragmatic properties support a monoclausal analysis for Modern Spanish Adv+C as well as for its historical source construction. I propose a cartographic analysis associating Adv+C and the source construction with a low position in Rizzi's split CP. Supported by corpus data, I identify a verum focus construction (Aff+C) as the origin of Adv+C. I claim that the loss of the verum interpretation triggers the reanalysis of the construction. This ultimately gives rise to its productive extension to other epistemic and evidential modifiers.
- Subjects
COMPLEMENTIZERS (Grammar); COMPLEMENT (Grammar); FUNCTION words (Grammar); EPISTEMIC logic; MODAL logic
- Publication
Journal of Historical Linguistics, 2017, Vol 7, Issue 1/2, p77
- ISSN
2210-2116
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1075/jhl.7.1-2.04koc