Getting closer: Codification of subjective semantic prosody in Spanish continuative aspect

Abstract

The syntactic correlates of the diachronic process of subjectification within grammatical constructions, unlike that of discourse markers and connectives, do not include a cancellation of syntax. This can make the identification of subjectification within some grammaticalization processes difficult to identify. Pairs of purportedly synonymous constructions, such as continuative aspectual markers in Spanish, offer an ideal site to explore how certain linguistic contexts, through frequency, can come to be associated with more or less subjectivity. Six forms are included in this study: the phasal adverbs aún ‘still’ and todavía ‘still’ and the “phasal periphrastic” (Laca 2000) constructions including (semi-)auxiliaries: seguir ‘follow’ + Vndo and continuar ‘continue’ for positive polarity, and the corresponding seguir sin ‘follow without’ + INF and continuar sin ‘continue without’ + INF for negative polarity. In a variationist study of 481 occurrences of these forms from 1760–1860 in Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE) and 2762 occurrences from 1975–1980 from Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA), it is found that the difference between these “synonyms” is linked, on the one hand, to contextual elements indicative of subjectivity, and on the other, to register. Furthermore, it is suggested that variation due to differing levels of subjectivity and register variation may share some characteristic patterns in the distribution of grammatical features.