Displaced directives. Subjunctive free-standing que-clauses vs. imperatives in Spanish

This paper presents a functional account of directives in spontaneous conversations in Spanish. More specifically, we address the use of imperatives and free-standing que-clauses with a directive meaning in interactions among equals. We start our analysis from Searle’s Speech Act Theory. The purpose of this paper is to clarify how imperatives and free-standing que-clauses with subjunctive mood function in terms of the range of speech acts and degree of prototypicality within the category of directives. In order to do so, we describe the functional range of both constructions and the syntactic differences among them. It is argued that que-clauses are displaced directives, expressing atypical directivity. We also posit a functional division of labor between prototypical imperatives and free-standing que-clauses with subjunctive mood. The study is based on the analysis of 57 conversations among adolescents from Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile (COLA corpus).

Jaar van publicatie:2015

BOF-keylabel:ja

IOF-keylabel:ja

BOF-publication weight:0.5

CSS-citation score:1

Authors from:Higher Education

Toegankelijkheid:Closed