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Part of
Insubordination
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*

| Universiteit Antwerpen

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.

Published online: 18 November 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.115.05gra
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