Paths in the development of elaborative discourse markers: Evidence from Spanish

Abstract

Since the 1980s, grammaticalization has taken up an important place in linguistic research, and the term grammaticalization has come to be applied to a very large number of linguistic changes which include, apart from prototypical instances of grammaticalization such as the development of function words from content words, other more peripheral or even controversial cases, such as changes in word order (Heine, Claudi and Hunnemeyer 1991: 25, Haspelmath 2004: 26, 38), the development of discourse markers (DMs), or categorial changes like those undergone by the English to-infinitive (Los 2004, 2005) and gerund (Tabor and Traugott 1998: 240-244, Fanego 2004: 45-49), two forms which started as verbal nouns of action and evolved into parts of the verb system. The focus of this paper is on the development of the Spanish manner adverbial de hecho „in practice‟ into a DM roughly synonymous with English in fact and indeed. The view that the historical development of DMs has similarities with the developments taking place within the domain of grammaticalization was first put forward by Elizabeth Traugott in her groundbreaking article on the regularity of semantic change (1982) and was explored in greater detail in Traugott (1995, 2003), Tabor and Traugott (1998), Schwenter and Traugott (2000) and Traugott and Dasher (2002). In the two decades since Traugott‟s initial work, research on DMs from the perspective of grammaticalization has multiplied; witness Jucker (1995), Brinton (1996), Onodera (2004), and Mosegaard Hansen and Rossari (2005), among many others. Yet with exceptions such as Garachana Camarero (1998), Pons Borderia and Ruiz Gurillo (2001) or Company Company (2004, 2006, 2008), the diachrony of Spanish DMs has attracted very little attention to date. One of the aims of this paper, therefore, is to examine the history of a Spanish DM whose English cognate, in fact, has been studied from both the synchronic (Oh 2000, Smith and Jucker 2000, Aijmer and Simon-Vandenbergen 2004) and diachronic (Schwenter and Traugott 2000) perspectives; synchronic descriptions of French en fait/de fait and Italian infatti are also available (cf. Danjou-Flax 1980, Roulet 1987, Rossari 1992, Iordanskaja and Melcuk 1995, Brutti 1999). A second aim is to check whether the history of Spanish de hecho can help to confirm some of the hypotheses put forward by Traugott and her associates regarding the trajectories followed by DMs cross-linguistically. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 defines DMs; sections 3 and 4 give an overview of research on DMs from the point of view of semantic change and grammaticalization respectively; section 5 introduces the research questions that this study intends to answer and examines the functions and development of Spanish de hecho; section 6 closes the paper.