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Discourse Particles: Syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and historical aspects
Edited by Xabier Artiagoitia, Arantzazu Elordieta and Sergio Monforte
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 276] 2022
► pp. 65–98

Chapter 3
The discourse particle es que in Spanish and in other Iberian languages

| Universitat de València
| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

We examine the historical reanalysis of the Spanish sequence es que (lit. ‘is that’) as a discourse particle with justificatory and even purely emphatic functions. We argue that the diachronic process involved first the appearance of non-coindexed pro as subject of the copula es ‘is’ and, at a later stage, deletion of the empty pronoun and syntactic restructuring. The restructuring was triggered by the use of the construction in counter-argumentative and other contexts where the semantic content of the null category was not easily recoverable. We also consider parallel developments in Catalan and Portuguese, as well as the borrowing of the particle es que in colloquial Basque.

Keywords: particle, counter-argumentative, justificatory, reduced clefts, grammaticalization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Constructions with the sequence es que
  • 3.v+comp vs. discourse particle
  • 4.The status of es que in justificatory constructions
  • 5.The historical process of the formation of the particle es que in Spanish
    • 5.1First Change: From a pseudo-cleft to a reduced cleft
    • 5.2Second change: From a reduced cleft to an inferential reduced cleft
    • 5.3Third change: From compound sentences to main clauses with the particle es-que
  • 6.Catalan and Portuguese
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Corpus
Published online: 17 May 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.276.03per
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