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In:Left Sentence Peripheries in Spanish: Diachronic, Variationist and Comparative Perspectives
Edited by Andreas Dufter and Álvaro S. Octavio de Toledo y Huerta
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 214] 2014
► pp. 217–252

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Chapter 8. Evidentiality and illocutionary force

Spanish matrix que at the syntax-pragmatics interface

 | ILLA-CCHS-CSIC
 | Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Published online: 31 July 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.214.13dem
This paper centers on certain aspects of the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface. Its main contribution is that it incorporates into the wide crosslinguistic list of grammatical evidentials one type of Spanish que ‘that’, which is claimed to have evolved into this category from a complementizer. To set our argument two cases are described: (i) (discourse initial) root clauses headed by que introducing a speech event (Etxepare 2007, 2010) which is reported; (ii) que-clauses reproducing previous discourse. Both descriptive and theoretical approaches group these instances of que together. We show, instead, that the first que is a “reportative evidential” while the second one is an ‘echoic’ que, a true (‘insubordinate’) complementizer, in some cases selected by a silent communication verb. The semantic and syntactic properties of both types of que are carefully described and syntactic-semantic analyses in terms of “illocutionary force” and discourse operators are proposed. Implications for the theory of the Left Periphery are also discussed.
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