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Part of
Language Change in the 20th Century: Exploring micro-diachronic evolutions in Romance languages
Edited by Salvador Pons Bordería and Shima Salameh Jiménez
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 340] 2024
► pp. 63–94

Chapter 2
The apparent-time construct as a proxy to spoken conversational data in the 20th century

A Spanish case study

| Ghent University
| Ghent University

The 20th century is characterized by important changes in the sociohistorical context of Spain, which have led to the steady process of colloquialization of Spanish, in both spoken and written language. Still, these major developments contrast sharply with the scarcity of oral conversational data. This paper investigates whether the apparent-time construct offers a solution for the data problem. According to this method, a linguistic phenomenon is analyzed across the speech of different generations during one time period. The basic assumption is that differences between generations mirror historical developments in language. This study investigates whether generational differences in the use of the Spanish pragmatic marker sabes ‘you know’ correspond to the grammaticalization cline previously observed in real-time data.

Keywords: data problem, apparent-time construct, spoken conversational data, pragmatic marker, sabes ‘you know’
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methodology
    • 2.1Corpus Oral de Madrid (CORMA)
    • 2.2Real-time versus apparent-time analysis
    • 2.3Data retrieval and parameters
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Evolution of overall productivity of sabes
    • 3.2Fossilization and reduction of syntactic capacities
    • 3.3Widening of scope and positional mobility
    • 3.4Functional evolution of sabes
  • 4.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 January 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.340.02eng
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