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Article published In: Linguistic Variation
Vol. 24:1 (2024) ► pp.1–36

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From a movement verb to an epistemic discourse marker

The diachronic change of Spanish vaya

 | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
 | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
ORCiD logo with link | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Published online: 9 December 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.22006.esp
Abstract
Besides its main use as a form of the movement verb ir ‘to go’, the Spanish form vaya (lit. go) is also used as a verbal discourse marker. Here we trace this transition from a purely verbal form to a discourse marker by searching a historical corpus of documents in Spanish, which reveals the increasing use over time of vaya in exclamatives to replace a presentational construction. We focus on vaya in isolation and in combination with an indefinite DP or a bare NP. We analyze the meaning of vaya as an epistemic discourse marker, by means of which the speaker expresses a judgment, a subjective epistemic and evidential evaluation of a proposition accessible from context. We postulate that these constructions sit in a Judgment Phrase at the syntactic-pragmatic interface (. 2020. Layers of assertive clauses: Propositions, judgements, commitments, acts. In Jutta M. Hartmann & Angelika Wöllstein (eds.), Propositionale Argumente im Sprachvergleich: Theorie und Empirier./Propositional arguments in cross-linguistic research: Theoretical and empirical issues. Gunter Narr Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), a position to which vaya also moves when its meaning is that of an expressive intensifier that directly modifies over one or more (contextually salient) properties of the noun contained in the DP/NP.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • A.VDMs are not predicates and therefore do not show argument selection
    • B.VDMs tend to be invariable morphophonologically
    • C.VDMs show syntactic weakening and decategorization
    • D.VDMs introduce a special type of procedural meaning (Sperber & Wilson 1986)
    • E.VDMs convey (inter)subjectification
  • 2.The diachronic development of vaya
  • 3.Vaya in expressives and exclamatives
    • 3.1Expressives
    • 3.2Exclamatives
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Vaya as an interjection
    • 4.2Vaya + indefinite DP and vaya + NP
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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