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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. 77–110

From verum to epistemic modality and evidentiality

On the emergence of the Spanish Adv+C construction

| University of Vienna

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 (Seguro Adv que C 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.

Keywords: left periphery, complementizers, verum focus, epistemic modality, evidentiality, grammaticalization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The phenomenon
  • 3.Properties of Adv+C in Modern Spanish
    • 3.1Syntactic distribution of Adv+C
    • 3.2Semantics and pragmatics of Adv+C
  • 4.Diachronic development of Adv+C
    • 4.1Biclausal source hypothesis
    • 4.2Verum hypothesis
  • 5.Towards an analysis of Adv+C and Aff+C
    • 5.1 Hernanz (2007) and a revised analysis for Aff+C
    • 5.2 Hill (2007) and a revised analysis for Adv+C
    • 5.3Process of grammaticalization
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Databases
  • References
Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.7.1-2.04koc
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