A cognitive approach to the grammaticalization of the epistemic marker
fijo
The present paper has as its aim to show the semantic
evolution of the form fijo through which it has acquired
increasingly pragmatic uses and functions until it became an epistemic
marker. Within this grammaticalization process, the cognitive procedures of
metaphor and metonymy, as well as the general mechanism of subjectification,
explain the semantic change experienced by this unit thanks to its
appearance in certain contextual patterns which have conventionalized the
epistemic value. Taking de fijo que, de fijo, and a
punto fijo/fixo as our reference, the corpus study reveals that
the variants of fijo code both the speaker’s epistemic
commitment and evidential contents, even though each one of them
conceptualizes the scene from a different perspective.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.A general historical overview of fijo and its
variants
- 3.Explanation of the semantic-pragmatic change operated in
fijo
- 3.1Metaphor and metonymy
- 3.2The grammaticalization process
- 3.3The expression of modality and evidentiality
- 4.The routinization process experienced by fijo
- 4.1The study sample
- 4.2Contexts with an epistemic value
- 4.3Coding of evidentiality
- 5.Conclusions
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
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References