Immediacy, counter-expectation, and grammatical marking: Intransitive constructions with an accusative clitic in Galician/Galego

Abstract

Abstract We provide a usage-based approach to the construction [locative deictic + accusative clitic + intransitive verb] found in Galician/Galego. In this construction, the intransitive verb and the accusative clitic agree in person and number and, in the case of the clitic, also in gender with the referent of the clitic, as in, for example, aí a está (lit.: ‘there her is/there she is’)/aí as están (lit.: ‘there them are/there they are’). A corpus-based analysis of this construction shows that it presents skewed grammatical patterns in terms of frequency of occurrence. This grammatical skewing reveals that the construction emerges from an interactional usage pattern in which speakers shift from a displaced to an immediate mode of speaking to present a counter-expected situation. The construction is also exploited in narratives in order to create a quality of immediacy for displaced events. Our usage-based analysis also reveals a family of constructions — some more schematic, others more specific; some more entrenched, others more novel — that emerge from the repetition of local usage patterns through which speakers/narrators express immediacy and counter-expectation.