Article published in:
The Rise and Development of Evidential and Epistemic Markers
Edited by Silvio Cruschina and Eva-Maria Remberger
[Journal of Historical Linguistics 7:1/2] 2017
► pp. 48–76

The grammaticalization of epistemicity in Ibero-Romance

Alike processes, unlike outcomes

| University of Cambridge
Typologically-unexpected overt expletives can be found in a restricted number of non-standard Ibero-Romance null-subject varieties. Historical data suggest that these overt expletives, which in today’s varieties show both discourse-oriented and expletive characteristics, have their origin in 15th century impersonal epistemic constructions. This article argues that it is the expletives’ epistemic origin which gives rise to, and thus explains, their present-day heterogeneous properties, in particular their function as a marker of epistemicity in a number of varieties. Despite undergoing the same mechanisms of change, the variation in modern Ibero-Romance is understood to be a consequence of the different stages and degrees of grammaticalization reached in each variety.
Keywords: overt expletives, epistemicity, grammaticalization, pragmaticization, Ibero-Romance, dialect syntax
Published online: 23 November 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.7.1-2.03cor
Corpora

Corpora

CdE: Davies, Mark 2002– Corpus del Español: 100 million words, 1200s–1900s. Available online at http://​www​.corpusdelespanol​.org.
CdP: Davies, Mark & Michael Ferreira 2006– Corpus do Português: 45 million words, 1300s–1900s. Available online at http://​www​.corpusdoportugues​.org
CORDE Real Academia Española (online): Corpus diacrónico del español (CORDE). Available online at http://​www​.rae​.es.
CORDIAL-SIN: Martins, Ana Maria (coord.) [2000-] (2010): CORDIAL-SIN: Corpus Dialectal para o Estudo da Sintaxe. Lisboa, Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa. Available online at http://​www​.clul​.ul​.pt​/en​/resources​/411​-cordial​-corpus.

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