Grammatical and Lexical Dialectal Variation in Spanish: The Case of deísmo

Abstract

Deísmo is a non-standard dialectal phenomenon consisting of the insertion of a non-required preposition de ‘of’ before a non-finite clause: Me apetece (de) salir ‘I want to go out’. In most papers, de is analyzed as a defective complementizer that does not change the meaning of the sentence. However, deísmo has also been associated with a prospective meaning with some verbs, and de has been considered as a marker of evidentiality with visual perception verbs. In this paper, we provide a formal analysis for deísmo constructions, in which de is located in a projection below that occupied by de in dequeísmo constructions). Secondly, we will show the results of a questionnaire whose objective is to figure out if there is an evidential meaning associated with deísmo. For the questionnaire, we made a preliminary search in Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural (COSER) and in Spanish Web Corpus 2018 (Sketch Engine). From this, we selected the most frequent verbs with deísmo in Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). An examination of the results revealed that, on the one hand, deísmo is lexically associated with certain verbs, but not necessarily with all of the same semantic class; and on the other hand, that there is not an evidential meaning associated with deísmo.