Exclamatives in the functional typology of insubordination: Evidence from complement insubordinate constructions in Spanish

Abstract

Insubordination is defined as the phenomenon whereby a formally subordinate clause is conventionally used as a main or independent clause. Evans (2007) identifies three macro-functions of insubordination crosslinguistically – (i) indirection and interpersonal control, (ii) modal qualification, and (iii) signaling high levels of presupposed material in the insubordinate proposition – and places exclamation and evaluation in the second macro-function. More recent works propose a higher generalization, arguing that insubordinate constructions express interpersonal meanings, and Van linden and Van de Velde (2014) claim that these meanings “almost invariably go together with exclamative illocutionary force” (2014: 228). Using data from different varieties of Spanish, we show that a narrow definition of ‘exclamative’ allows to describe the properties of individual exclamative-evaluative constructions in Spanish more adequately. We argue that exclamative-evaluative constructions constitute a separate subset of insubordinate constructions, with their own formal and interpretive features. From a methodological point of view, we show that a constructional approach allows to operationalize the notion of insubordination and to set apart exclamative-evaluative insubordinate constructions from other formally similar constructions in the language. In addition, we show that the constructional status can be used as a test for insubordinate status, as an insubordinate construction pairs a ‘subordinate’ form with a non-compositional meaning.