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Part of
Studies in Historical Ibero-Romance Morpho-Syntax
Edited by Miriam Bouzouita, Ioanna Sitaridou and Enrique Pato
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 16] 2018
► pp. 275–302

Chapter 12
Realmente, verdaderamente and ciertamente

On the relation between epistemic modality and intensifying adverbs

| Universitat de Barcelona

This paper deals with the historical evolution of three epistemic adverbs in Spanish, verdaderamente, realmente and ciertamente. First, we describe how these adverbs grammaticalise – or pragmaticalise – as discourse markers and, therefore, widen their structural scope. Secondly, we show how these words experience a subsequent functionalisation, allowing them to function once again as adverbs, but now as adjective modifiers and not as verbal adverbs. Finally, we conclude that the fact that verdaderamente, ciertamente and realmente preserve all these different meanings at the same time is not out of line with many other grammaticalisation processes, a feature defined in the bibliography as “layering” (Hopper, 1991).

Keywords: Spanish, grammaticalisation, epistemicity, adverbs, discourse markers, intensifying
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3. Verdaderamente, realmente and ciertamente as verbal adverbs
  • 4. Verdaderamente, realmente and ciertamente as sentence adverbs
  • 5. Verdaderamente, realmente and ciertamente as discourse markers
  • 6.The development of a new adverbial function: Verdaderamente, realmente and ciertamente as intensifying adverbs
    • 6.1Chronology and distribution
    • 6.2Extension of the adjective modifier function
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.16.12gon
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Corpus

Real Academia Española
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Corpus del español actual (CREA). Madrid: RAE. [URL]
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Pountain, Christopher J.
2018. Chapter 13. Variation and the use of discourse markers in 16th-century Spanish. In Studies in Historical Ibero-Romance Morpho-Syntax [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 16], ► pp. 303 ff. DOI logo
Ørsnes, Bjarne
2022. Intensifiers and epistemic adverbials – On the history of German echt ‘really, lit. real/genuine’. Kalbotyra 75 ► pp. 107 ff. DOI logo

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