An interactional account of discourse-connective que-constructions in Spanish
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Pedro Gras
Pedro Gras holds a PhD in Spanish Linguistics from the University of Barcelona. Currently he is an associate professor of Spanish Linguistics at the Universiteit Antwerpen and a visiting professor at KU Leuven. His main research interests are construction grammar, interactional linguistics and insubordination. He is particularly interested in the pragmatic aspects of grammatical constructions.
María Sol Sansiñena is a researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Leuven (Belgium). Her research interests include complementation and clause combining, grammaticalization and constructionalization, interaction and grammar, pragmatics and the analysis of mood and modality.
Abstract
This paper offers an interactional analysis of discourse-connective que-constructions in Spanish. In particular, we discuss how these constructions operate at discourse level and we analyze the kind of interactional activities conversation participants are engaged in while using them. In previous studies, initial que has been described along the following lines: as an expletive element, as a marker of background information, as a modal particle, as signaling the presence of the speaker, and as part of a quotative construction. Nevertheless, analyses of free-standing que-constructions are usually based on subjective data from introspection and tend to focus only on the clause introduced by que, regardless of its discourse context. Our hypothesis is that the meaning of discourse-connective que-constructions is primarily indexical: they refer to a relevant piece of contextual information that can be retrieved from a previous utterance or turn, a previous discourse situation, a proposition being observed or one that is inferable from the speech situation. This paper helps define the discourse contexts where que-constructions are used more precisely, while also providing a description of the situated meanings que-constructions express in particular types of context.
Funding statement: Funding: Work on this paper was supported by a project funded by the Research Council of the University of Leuven (Ref: GOA/12/007).
About the authors
Pedro Gras holds a PhD in Spanish Linguistics from the University of Barcelona. Currently he is an associate professor of Spanish Linguistics at the Universiteit Antwerpen and a visiting professor at KU Leuven. His main research interests are construction grammar, interactional linguistics and insubordination. He is particularly interested in the pragmatic aspects of grammatical constructions.
María Sol Sansiñena is a researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Leuven (Belgium). Her research interests include complementation and clause combining, grammaticalization and constructionalization, interaction and grammar, pragmatics and the analysis of mood and modality.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the audiences of talks in Leuven, Stockholm and Barcelona for fruitful discussions on the topics discussed in this paper. We are also grateful to An Van linden, Hendrik De Smet, Bert Cornillie, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article.
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- “Wicked” women in contemporary pop culture: “bad” language and gender in Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Saving Grace
- The interplay between agency and constraint: some departures from the organization of talk in the classroom
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