Speech-act orientation and intersubjective alignment: modal and evidential meanings of Spanish conditional and future forms

This project seeks to use corpus evidence to gain a better insight into the relationship between modal and evidential meanings of the Spanish conditional and future markers, and to inquire into their spreading into new territories, semantically and pragmatically, in the Peninsular and Rioplatense varieties. This is to be done through a set of case studies on the development of un(der)described constructions such as Estaría necesitando un abrazo urgente Lit. I would be needing a hug urgent ‘I need a hug urgently’, which parody the hearsay conditional to express the speaker's subjective stance or judgement. The starting hypothesis is that the constructional changes follow a tendency towards increasing speech-act orientation. To demonstrate this directionality, we will examine recent stages of change and look into the distribution of epistemic rights and access in the speech situation, the combination of perspectives, and the pragmatic enabling factors for change and we will develop syntactic, semantic-pragmatic and prosodic arguments grounded in a data-based approach and in statistical models.

Keywords:modality, evidentiality, conditional, future, Spanish, constructionalization

Disciplines:Spanish language, Corpus linguistics