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In:The Grammar of Interaction: Epistemicity, information management and discourse in language use
Edited by Susana Rodríguez Rosique and Jordi M. Antolí Martínez
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 46] 2025
► pp. 132–149

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Quotatives and stance taking

 | Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 17 October 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.46.05del
Abstract
Recent studies on quotatives have shown that they can become stance markers. In the case of English, it has been recognized that speakers index their relationship and attitude toward quotatives and express the general probability of the occurrence of the quote, as seen with forms be like, go and other quotatives that are used to mark the degree of hypotheticality (Buchstaller 2001). Recent data from young Mexican speakers revealed that novel quotatives can be used to share subjective states of the speaker. In this chapter, we show that new and old quotatives in Mexican Spanish are undergoing a discourse specialization process. Following the epistemic continuum proposed by Buchstaller (2001), we suggest that Spanish quotatives have taken on novel functions related to epistemic and mirative stances.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Quotatives: Language change and polyfunctionality
  • 3.Quotatives in young Mexican speakers
    • 3.1Corpus and data
    • 3.2New and old quotatives in young Mexican speakers
  • 4.Discourse specialization and stance taking
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Corpus data
  • References
References (41)
Corpus data
De la Mora, Juliana (en línea). “Corpus de conversaciones Ameresco-Querétaro”, en Albelda y Estellés (coords.): Corpus Ameresco, [URL], Universitat de València, ISSN: 2659-8337.
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