Va a ser que no

This study seeks to gain a better insight into the origin and expansion of the construction <va a ser que sí/no> (lit. goes to be that yes/no) in Peninsular Spanish. We argue that this construction derives from the use of the periphrastic future construction <ir a ‘go to’ + inf> in a pseudo-cleft sentence whose subject is a deictic element or an element that conveys the speaker’s attitudinal assessment of the propositional content expressed in the attribute, a complement que-clause. The etymological structure evolves through a process that formally implies the suppression of the explicit subject and the fusion of the components va a ser que leading to the conventionalization of refutative and assertive values. To demonstrate this directionality, we examine recent stages of change and develop syntactic and semantic-pragmatic arguments grounded in a data-based approach.