Cover not available
Part of
Language Change in the 20th Century: Exploring micro-diachronic evolutions in Romance languages
Edited by Salvador Pons Bordería and Shima Salameh Jiménez
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 340] 2024
► pp. 63–94

Chapter 2
The apparent-time construct as a proxy to spoken conversational data in the 20th century

A Spanish case study

 | Ghent University
 | Ghent University
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.
Keywords: data problem, apparent-time construct, spoken conversational data, pragmatic marker, sabes ‘you know’
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
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 January 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.340.02eng
References (88)
References
Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. 2000. “Emerging Adulthood: A Theory of Development from the Late Teens through the Twenties.” American Psychologist 55 (5): 469–480. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Azofra Sierra, Elena, and Renata Enghels. 2017. “El proceso de gramaticalización del marcador epistémico deverbal sabes.” Iberoromania 85: 105–129.Google Scholar
Bailey, Guy. 2002. “Real and Apparent Time.” In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. by Jack K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes, 312–323. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bailey, Guy, Tom Wikle, Jan Tillery and Lori Sand. 1991. “The Apparent Time Construct.” Language Variation and Change 3 (3): 241–264. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barbieri, Federika. 2008. “Patterns of Age-based Linguistic Variation in American English.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12 (1): 58–88. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bednarek, Monika. 2010. The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity. London and New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
. 2019. “The Multifunctionality of Swear/Taboo Words in Television Series.” In Emotion in Discourse, ed. by J. Lachlan Mackenzie, and Laura Alba-Juez, 29–54. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blas Arroyo, José Luis 2005. Sociolingüística del español: desarrollos y perspectivas en el estudio de la lengua española en contexto social. Madrid: Cátedra.Google Scholar
Bowie, David. 2005. “Language Change over the Lifespan: A Test of the Apparent Time Construct.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 11 (2): 45–58.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. 2008. The Comment Clause in English: Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Briz Gómez, Antonio. 1996. “Los intensificadores en la conversación coloquial.” In Pragmática y gramática del español hablado, ed. by Antonio Briz Gómez, José Ramón Gómez Molina, M. José Martínez Alcalde y Grupo Val.Es.Co, 13–36. Zaragoza: Pórtico.Google Scholar
. 1998. El español coloquial en la conversación: esbozo de pragmagramática. Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar
. 2012. “Los déficits de los corpus orales del español (y de algunos análisis).” In Cum corde et in nova grammatica. Estudios ofrecidos a Guillermo Rojo ed. by Tomás Jiménez Juliá, Belén López Meirama, Victoria Vázquez Rozas, and Alexandre Veiga, 115–137. Santiago de Compostela: Servizo de Publicacións e Intercambio Científico da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela.Google Scholar
Briz Gómez, Antonio, and Salvador Pons Bordería. 2010. “Unidades, marcadores discursivos y posición.” In Los estudios de marcadores del discurso en español, hoy, ed. by Óscar Loureda Lamas, and Esperanza Acín Villa, 327–358. Madrid: Arco Libros.Google Scholar
Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman. 1989. “Politeness theory and Shakespeare’s four Major Tragedies.” Language in Society 18 (2): 159–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brumme, Jenny 2008. La oralidad fingida: descripción y traducción: Teatro, cómic y medios audiovisuales. Frankfurt, Madrid: Vervuert, Iberoamericana.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2003. “Mechanisms of Change in Grammaticalization: The Role of Frequency.” In The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, ed. by Brian D. Joseph, and Richard D. Janda, 602–623. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Richard. 2005. “Aging and Gendering.” Language in Society 34 (1): 23–61. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011. “Aging, Age, and Sociolinguistics.” In The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, ed. by Manuel Díaz-Campos, 207–229. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Casanova, Julián, and Carlos Gil Andrés. 2014. Twentieth-century Spain: A history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny. 2006. “Age- and Generation-specific Use of Language.” In Sociolinguistics: an International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, ed. by Ulrich Ammond, Norbert Dittmar, and Klaus J. Mattheier, 1552–1563. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Company Company, Concepción. 2004. “¿Gramaticalización o desgramaticalización? Reanálisis y subjetivización de verbos como marcadores discursivos en la historia del español.” Revista de filología española 84 (1): 29–66.
. 2006. “Subjectification of Verbs into Discourse Markers: Semantic-pragmatic Change Only.” Belgian Journal of Linguistics 20 (1): 97–121.
Culpeper, Jonathan, and Merja Kytö. 2000. “The Conjunction and in Early Modern English: Frequencies and Uses in Speech-related Writing and Other Texts.” Topics in English Linguistics 31: 299–328.Google Scholar
Díaz-Campos, Manuel. 2014. Introducción a la sociolingüística hispánica. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 1997. “Age as a Sociolinguistic Variable.” In The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, ed. by Florian Coulmas 151–167. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1995. “Constructing Meaning, Constructing Selves: Snapshots of Language, Gender, and Class from Belten High.” In Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self, ed. by Kira Hall, and Mary Bucholtz 479–518. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Eisenstein, Evelyn. 2005. “Adolescência: Definições, conceitos e critérios.” Adolesc Saude 2: 6–7.Google Scholar
Enghels, Renata. 2018a. “On the Grammaticalization of the Deverbal Epistemic Pragmatic Marker sabes: A Study in Recent Language Change.” Romanian Review of Linguistics 63 (4): 341–360.Google Scholar
. 2018b. “Towards a Constructional Approach to Discourse-level phenomena: The Case of the Spanish Interpersonal Epistemic Stance Construction.” Folia Linguistica 52 (1): 107–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Enghels, Renata, and Elena Azofra Sierra. 2018. “On the Nature of the Corpus and the Comparability of Results in Historical Linguistics: Case Study of the Pragmatic Marker you know.” Spanish in Context 15 (3), 465–489. . DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Enghels, Renata, Clara Vanderschueren, and Miriam Bouzouita. 2015. “Panorama de los corpus y textos del español peninsular contemporáneo.” In Manuel des anthologies, corpus et textes romans, ed. by Eugeen Roegiest, and Maria liescu, 147–170. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Enghels, Renata, Fien De Latte, and Linde Roels. 2020. “El Corpus Oral de Madrid (CORMA): materiales para el estudio (socio)lingüístico del español coloquial actual.” Zeitschrift für Katalanistik 33: 45–76. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Estrada Arráez, Ana, and Carlota de Benito Moreno. 2016. “Variación en las redes sociales: datos twilectales.” Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 14 (2): 77–111. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frost, Ram, Avital Deutsch, Orna Gilboa, Michal Tannenbaum, and William Marslen-Wilson. 2000. “Morphological Priming: Dissociation of Phonological, Semantic, and Morphological Factors.” Memory & Cognition 28: 1277–1288. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garachana Camarero, Mar. 2008. “Cuestiones pragmáticas sobre la negación.” Revista Electrónica de Didáctica / Español Lengua Extranjera 12: 1–11.Google Scholar
Garrod, Simon, and Gwyneth Doherty. 1994. “Conversation, Co-ordination and Convention: An Empirical Investigation of How Groups Establish Linguistic Conventions.” Cognition 53 (3): 181–215. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garrod, Simon, and Martin J. Pickering. 2004. “Why is Conversation So Easy?.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (1): 8–11. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garrod, Simon, and Martin J. Pickering. 2013. “Dialogue: Interactive Alignment and its Implications for Language Learning and Language Change.” In The Language Phenomenon, ed. by Philippe M. Binder, and Kenny Smith, 47–64. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Giles, Howard, Justine Coupland, and Nikolas Coupland. 1991. “Accommodation Theory: Communication, Context, and Consequence.” In Contexts of Accommodation, ed. by Howard Giles, Justine Coupland, and Nikolas Coupland, 1–68. New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goetsch, Paul. 1985. “Fingierte Mündlichkeit in der Erzählkunst entwickelter Schriftkulturen.” Poetica 17 (3–4): 202–218.Google Scholar
Gómez, Rosario, and Isabel Molina Martos. 2013. Variación yeísta en el mundo hispánico. Frankfurt, Madrid: Vervuert, Iberoamericana. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gregory, Michael, and Susanne Carroll. 1978. Language and Situation: Language Varieties and their Social Contexts. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hartsuiker, Robert J., and Casper Westenberg. 2000. “Word Order Priming in Written and Spoken Sentence Production.” Cognition 75 (2): B27–B39. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herbert, Ulrich. 2007. “Europe in High Modernity. Reflections on a Theory of the 20th Century.” Journal of Modern European History 5 (1): 5–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hopper, Paul J. 1991. “On Some Principles of Grammaticalization.” In Approaches to Grammaticalization, ed. by Elizabeth Closs Traugott, and Bernd Heine, 17–36. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
House, Juliane. 2009. “Subjectivity in English as Lingua Franca Discourse: The case of you know.” Intercultural Pragmatics 6 (2): 171–193. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hummel, Martin. 2014. “La reconstrucción diacrónica entre oralidad y escritura. El caso de los marcadores discursivos claro, entonces y total.” In Marcadores del discurso. Perspectivas y contrastes, ed. by María M. García Negroni, 35–61. Buenos Aires, Santiago: Arcos Editor.Google Scholar
Ireland, Molly E., and James W. Pennebaker. 2010. “Language Style Matching in Writing: Synchrony in Essays, Correspondence, and Poetry.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99 (3): 549–571. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Henry, Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison. 2009. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge: MIT Press.. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul. 1996. “Children, Adolescents, and Language Change.” Language Variation and Change 8 (2): 177–202. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kluge, Bettina. 2011. “Camino de un marcador del discurso: una comparación del español ¿sabes? con el francés tu sais y el inglés you know.” In Marcadores del discurso: de la descripción a la definición, ed. by Heidi Aschenberg, and Óscar Loureda, 305–341. Madrid, Frankfurt: Iberoamericana, Vervuert. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koch, Peter, and Wulf Oesterreicher. 2007. Lengua hablada en la Romania: Español, francés, italiano. Madrid: Gredos.Google Scholar
Kootstra, Gerrit Jan, and Pieter Muysken. 2019. “Structural Priming, Levels of Awareness, and Agency in Contact-Induced Language Change.” Languages, 4 (3): 65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kozloff, Sarah. 2000. Overhearing Film Dialogue. Berkeley: University of California Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. Cambridge: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, Nicholas Smith, and Paul Rayson. 2012. “English Style on the Move: Variation and Change in Stylistic Norms in the Twentieth Century.” Language & Computers 76: 69–98.Google Scholar
Levey, David. 2008. Language Change and Variation in Gibraltar. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lindell, Anna K., and Nicole Campione-Barr. 2017. “Continuity and Change in the Family System across the Transition from Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood.” Marriage & Family Review 53 (4): 388–416. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Llopis Cardona, Ana, and Salvador Pons Bordería. 2020. “La gramaticalización de macho y tío/a como ciclo semántico-pragmático.” Círculo De Lingüística Aplicada a La Comunicación 82: 151–164. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lucas, Margery. 2000. “Semantic Priming without Association: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 7: 618–630. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Macaulay, Ronald. 2002. “You know, it depends.” Journal of Pragmatics 34 (6): 749–767. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevalainen, Terrtu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. 2003. Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England. Harlow: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Padilla Herrada, María Soledad. 2016. “Marcadores y partículas discursivas interactivas en el entorno político/periodístico de Twitter.” Philologia Hispalensis 30 (1): 193–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pickering, Martin J., and Holly P. Branigan. 1998. “The Representation of Verbs: Evidence from Syntactic Priming in Language Production.” Journal of Memory and Language 39: 633–651. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pickering, Martin J., and Victor S. Ferreira. 2008. “Structural Priming: A Critical Review.” Psychological Bulletin 134: 427–459. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pons Bordería, Salvador. 2014. “El siglo XX como diacronía: Intuición y comprobación en el caso de o sea.” RILCE (Revista del Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Españolas) 30 (3): 985–1016. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reichelt, Susan. 2021. “Recent Developments of the Pragmatic Markers kind of and sort of in Spoken British English.” English Language & Linguistics 25 (3): 563–580. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roels, Linde, and Renata Enghels. 2020. “Age-based Variation and Patterns of Recent Language Change: a Case-study of Morphological and Lexical Intensifiers in Spanish.” Journal of Pragmatics 170: 125–138. . DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schmid, Hans Jörg. 2020. The Dynamics of the Linguistic System: Usage, Conventionalization, and Entrenchment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sell, Roger D. 2000. Literature as Communication: The Foundations of Mediating Criticism. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas H. Jucker. 2010. “Trends and Developments in Historical Pragmatics.” In Historical Pragmatics, ed. by Andreas. H. Jucker, and Irma Taavitsainen, 3–30. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2008. “So Different and Pretty Cool! Recycling Intensifiers in Toronto, Canada.” English Language & Linguistics 12 (2): 361–394. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A., and Alexandra d’Arcy. 2007. “Frequency and Variation in the Community Grammar: Tracking a New Change through the Generations.” Language Variation and Change 19 (2): 199–217. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tanghe, Sanne. 2013. “Acerca de los intensificadores vaya y qué: un estudio comparativo.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 90 (7): 751–771. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tannen, Deborah. 1982. “Oral and Literate Strategies in Spoken and Written Narratives.” Language 58: 1–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Sandra A., and Anthony Mulac. 1991. “The Discourse Conditions for the Use of the Complementizer that in Conversational English.” Journal of Pragmatics 15: 237–251. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomka, Béla. 2013. A Social History of Twentieth-century Europe. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Torrejón, Alfredo. 1991. “Fórmulas de tratamiento de segunda persona singular en el español de Chile.” Hispania 74 (4): 1068–1076. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vincent, Sophie, Sarah Darbaky, and Amina Mettouchi. 2009. “The Grammaticalization of you know: From Shared Knowledge to Control over the Co-speaker.” English Text Construction 2 (2), 209–227. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wagner, Suzanne Evans 2012. “Age Grading in Sociolinguistic Theory.” Language and Linguistics Compass 6 (6): 371–382. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wieling, Martijn, Jack Grieve, Gosse Bouma, Josef Fruehwald, John Coleman, and Mark Liberman. 2016. “Variation and Change in the Use of Hesitation Markers in Germanic Languages.” Language Dynamics and Change 6 (2): 199–234. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Williams, Angie M. 1992. Intergenerational Communication Satisfaction: An Intergroup Analysis. Unpublished Master’s thesis, Santa Barbara: University of California.Google Scholar
Williams, Angela, Howard Giles, Nikolas Coupland, Michelle Dalby, and Hannah Manasse. 1990. “The Communicative Contexts of Elderly Social Support and Health: A Theoretical Model.” Health Communication 2 (3): 123–143. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Williams, Angie, and Jake Harwood. 2004. “Intergenerational Communication: Intergroup, Accommodation, and Family Perspectives.” In Handbook of Communication and Aging Research, ed. by Jon F. Nussbaum, and Justine, 135–158. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Yaeger-Dror, Malcah. 1989. “Real Time vs. Apparent Time Change in Montreal French.” York Papers in Linguistics 13: 141–154.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, Klaus. 2002. “La variedad juvenil y la interacción verbal entre jóvenes.” In El lenguaje de los jóvenes, ed. by Félix Rodríguez González, 137–164. Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Salameh Jiménez, Shima & Adrià Pardo Llibrer
2024. El tratamiento de las unidades discursivas superiores de lo escrito: desde el párrafo y más allá del párrafo. Retos, propuestas y materiales. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 99 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.