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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. 288–317

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How Catalan expresses indifference

Patterns and variants

 | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 17 October 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.46.11mas
Abstract
The Catalan language offers various resources through which speakers can express indifference toward the alternatives presented to them. The most widespread ones, documented in both normative works and descriptive sources, are fixed constructions derived from equality comparatives. These include qualitative comparatives with the adjective igual ‘same’ and quantitative comparatives in which tant ‘as much’ precedes the verb it modifies, typically ésser ‘to be’, fer ‘to do’, or valer ‘to be worth’. However, an examination of the geolinguistic survey Atles Lingüístic del Domini Català (ALDC) and the corpora Corpus Textual Informatitzat de la Llengua Catalana (CTILC) and Corpus Informatitzat del Valencià (CIVAL) reveals lesser-known equivalent expressions, such as those based on the verb tenir ‘to have’.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Equality comparatives as expressions of indifference
  • 3.Semantic network and pragmatic functions of indifference constructions
  • 4.Linguistic strategies for the intensification of indifference constructions
  • 5.Other indifference constructions with more limited dialectal reach
  • 6.A diversity of indifference constructions with the verb tenir ‘to have’
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (18)
References
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