Chapter 2
The apparent-time construct as a proxy to spoken conversational data in the 20th century
A Spanish case study
The 20th century is characterized by important changes in the sociohistorical context of Spain, which have led to
the steady process of colloquialization of Spanish, in both spoken and written language. Still, these major developments
contrast sharply with the scarcity of oral conversational data. This paper investigates whether the apparent-time construct
offers a solution for the data problem. According to this method, a linguistic phenomenon is analyzed across the speech of
different generations during one time period. The basic assumption is that differences between generations mirror historical
developments in language. This study investigates whether generational differences in the use of the Spanish pragmatic marker
sabes ‘you know’ correspond to the grammaticalization cline previously observed in real-time data.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Data and methodology
- 2.1Corpus Oral de Madrid (CORMA)
- 2.2Real-time versus apparent-time analysis
- 2.3Data retrieval and parameters
- 3.Results
- 3.1Evolution of overall productivity of sabes
- 3.2Fossilization and reduction of syntactic capacities
- 3.3Widening of scope and positional mobility
- 3.4Functional evolution of sabes
- 4.Discussion
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Notes
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References