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Language contact and the linguistic coding of evidentiality in varieties of Spanish in Latin America
(2022)
This study adopts a cognitive approach to the analysis of the use of the Spanish imperfecto as a construal form for the conceptualization of state of affairs in certain journalistic texts. In doing so, the main focus of the study is to investigate cognitive processes like modalization and subjectivization, which are related to the speaker’s standpoint and to his subjective, not grammatically motivated, decision to use the imperfective instead of the perfective form. By the help of the corpus programmes GlossaNet and CREA (corpus of the Real Academia Española) we analyze the imperfective use of some Spanish verbs, which are semantically perfective in nature so that the normative use would require a perfective form. In other words, we investigate how the speaker/journalist construes a reality or situation to be expressed by means of the imperfecto and show that this use of the imperfect is typical for journalistic discourse.
The present paper is concerned with the phenomenon of reporting on the speakers’ thinking when both the reporting and the reported clauses originate in one and the same speaker, i.e. the performative uses of the verbs sp. creer and pt. achar (‘think’). The data are retrieved from the CdE-NOW and CdP-NOW. Adopting both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, I concentrate on reporting on thinking with and without the overt expression of the subject pronouns sp. yo and pt. eu. In doing so, the constructions (yo) creo (que) and (eu) acho (que) as well as parenthetic and right-peripheral creo yo and acho eu are studied. According to the corpus data and compared to other possible constructions with creo and acho, creo que and acho que represent the most frequent constructions if searching for the ‘node’ creo or acho, that is, if the non-use of the subject pronoun exceeds its explicit expression.
This book is concerned with the diachronic development of selected topic and focus markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French. On the one hand, it focuses on the development of these structures from their relational meaning to their topic-/ focus-marking meaning, and on the other hand, it is concerned with their current form und use. Thus, Romance topic and focus markers – such as sp. en cuanto a, pt. a propósito de, fr. au niveau de or sentence-initial sp. Lo que as well as clefts and pseudo-clefts – are investigated from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The author argues that topic markers have procedural meaning and that their function is bound to their syntactic position. An important contribution of this study is the fact that real linguistic evidence (in the form of data from various corpora) is analyzed instead of operating with constructed examples.
On the evidential use of English adverbials and their equivalents in Romance languages and Russian
(2017)
The present study investigates the use of equivalents of the English adverbials seemingly and apparently with a specific morphological structure in Romance languages and Russian, i.e. Spanish al parecer, Portuguese ao parecer and ao que parece, French avoir l’air de, Italian all’apparenza and in apparenza as well as Russian по-видимому. The underlying hypothesis is that the function and syntactic behaviour of these adverbial locutions are motivated by their morphological composition. It is to investigate whether the adverbials may be used sentence-initially, parenthetically, as an adverbial with broad or narrow scope or as a component of a modalised predication. The adverbial locutions are treated as means of expression where evidentiality and epistemic modality represent overlapping functional-semantic categories.
This article deals with Spanish modal adverbs and verbs of cognitive attitude (Capelli 2007) and their epistemic and/or evidential use. The article is based upon the hypothesis that the study of the use of these linguistic devices has to be highly context-sensitive, as it is not always (only) the sentence level that has to be looked at if one wants to find out whether a certain adverb or verb of cognitive attitude is used evidentially or epistemically. In this article, therefore, the context is used to determine which meaning aspects of an element are encoded and which are contributed by the context. The data were retrieved from the daily newspaper El Pais. Nevertheless, the present study is not a quantitative one, but rather a qualitative study. My corpus analysis indicates that it is not possible to differentiate between the linguistic categories of evidentiality and epistemic modality in every case, although it indeed is possible in the vast majority of cases. In verbs of cognitive attitude, evidentiality and epistemic modality seem to be two interwoven categories, while concerning modal adverbs it is usually possible to separate the categories and to distinguish between the different subtypes of evidentiality such as visual evidence, hearsay and inference.