Evaluation of two hypotheses about the alternation between aquí and acá in a corpus of present-day Spanish

Abstract

ABSTRACTSpanish grammarians used to say that the demonstrative adverbs aquí ‘here’ and acá ‘here’ can alternate in some contexts. They attempt to explain the alternation by appealing to one of two hypotheses, which can be identified as the movement-to-a-goal hypothesis and the delimitation hypothesis. The former states that acá is associated with movement directed to a goal, whereas aquí is associated with all other possibilities. The latter states that the place denoted by aquí is less limited and defined than the place denoted by acá The present article evaluates both hypotheses in a corpus of Venezuelan Spanish. The evaluation takes into account the kind of place denoted by aquí and acá (goal of movement, source of movement, place of transit, and location) and also the prepositions and verbs used when the adverbs denote the goal of movement. The results of the quantitative analysis prove the validity of the delimitation hypothesis.