Part of
InsubordinationEdited by Nicholas Evans and Honoré Watanabe
[Typological Studies in Language 115] 2016
► pp. 113–144
Edited by Nicholas Evans and Honoré Watanabe
[Typological Studies in Language 115] 2016
► pp. 113–144
Chapter 5. Revisiting the functional typology of insubordination
Insubordinate que-constructions in Spanish*
The aim of this chapter is to discuss the functional typology of insubordination in the light of Spanish data. The empirical focus is on the functional load of que-initial sentences, which are the most frequent insubordinate constructions in Peninsular Spanish. Que-initial sentences can display several functions in interaction: third person imperatives, optatives, evaluative modality, echo-sentences, self-repetition, signalling relevant information, among others. Considering their high polyfunctionality, I address two interrelated questions. Firstly, I examine whether que-initial sentences can be considered instances of a single polysemous construction or whether they are different form-meaning pairings with their own grammatical and/or discursive features. A corpus-based constructional analysis allows the identification of two insubordinate que-constructions that differ not only in their meaning, but also in their formal and discourse properties. Secondly, I examine to what extent the functional typology of insubordination proposed in Evans (2007) can account for the wide array of functions displayed by que-initial sentences and I propose a typology of insubordination which considers two main macrofunctions: (i) non-declarative sentence modality and (ii) context dependency.
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