From visual perception to evidentiality: A functional empirical approach to se ve que in Spanish

Abstract

The Spanish sequence se ve (que) presents intricate functional polysemy, including constructionalization as an evidential. The present paper investigates its different formal-functional combinations and degrees of specialization as an evidential construction. The following questions were addressed: (1) How many different senses can be distinguished in the sequence se ve (que) and what are their respective frequencies? (2) How do these senses correlate with the morphosyntactic behavior of the sequence se ve (que)? (3) Which senses of se ve (que) are more closely related to each other, and how does the evidential construction relate to this polysemous network? The semantic and formal affinities of se ve (que) were studied through the Behavioral Profiles method developed by Gries and Divjak (2009), which provides an empirical, systematic and verifiable approach to studying lexical phenomena. Its application to a pragmatic phenomenon is a new departure. The results show seven senses of se ve (que), ranging from the lexical value of direct physical perception to the more abstract and evidential value of 'source of information'. According to the corpus analysis, the closest senses to the evidential pole are indirect physical perception and cognitive perception. These all introduce an inflected verb clause, possess propositional scope and are morphosyntactically frozen..