Nuevos usos para viejas formas: el caso de cualmente en judeoespañol

Abstract

Abstract Sephardic texts show a wide variety of adverbial forms ending in -mente, where the etymological scheme of adjective (fem.-sing.) + -mente has been broadened with formations such as verdadmente (‘truly’) or cercamente (‘closely’), in which the suffix -mente is attached (respectively) to a nominal and an adverbial base to form new adverbs of mode/manner. Now, the form cualmente deserves a whole new chapter. Thus, as it has been shown so far (García Moreno 2004, 264‒265, and Hernández González 2012, 196‒197, and 2018), this form of original adverbial character – with a similar meaning to that of its parallel talmente – shows in Judeo-Spanish a process of grammaticalization that has led it to function as a conjunction to introduce completive subordinate clauses.Having said that, such conjunctive uses – mainly documented in Sephardic texts of the so-called «rabbinical prose» of the 18th and 19th centuries – are practically absent in more modern texts. However, as we have demonstrated in this contribution, the form cualmente appears again reanalyzed in journalistic texts from the 1930 s as a type of a relative adverb with a value equivalent to that of ʻaccording to whichʼ and agglutinating the values +relative and +manner of their respective formants cual and -mente.