Evidential and mirative expressions in english and spanishGrammaticalization and discourse functions

Resumen

This dissertation is aimed at examining mirativity—the linguistic expression of surprise—and, to a lesser extent, evidentiality—the linguistic coding of source of information—as well as the relationship between both categories in English and, incidentally, in Spanish, from a diachronic perspective. Thus, it sets out to explore some of the diachronic processes whereby these categories have emerged in these languages. Evidentiality and mirativity are two closely related linguistic categories that are morphologically expressed in a substantial number of the world’s languages. However, these intricately related semantic notions do not possess morphological status in English or Spanish. In spite of the extensive literature on evidentiality and mirativity, the diachronic evolution of these categories in these languages is still a pending subject, especially as regards mirativity. In order to fill this gap, the present dissertation puts forward four complementary case studies that deal with several aspects concerning the diachronic emergence of evidential and mirative constructions in English and Spanish. On the one hand, I examine a set of verb constructions with the raising verbs 'turn out' (e.g. she turned out to be his sister), its Spanish equivalent 'resultar' (e.g. resultó ser una falsa alarma ‘it turned out to be a false alarm’), and 'end up' (e.g. he ended up buying the most expensive cell phone). On the other hand, I examine the parenthetical expression 'needless to say' (e.g. I won’t go there again, needless to say). While constructions featuring 'turn out' and 'resultar' express both evidential and mirative meaning, 'end up' only conveys mirativity. All of them, however, are resultative and change-of-state verbs that eventually acquire mirative (and/or evidential) senses through a process of pragmatic enrichment, subjectification and grammaticalization. The role played by analogy is also argued to be pivotal in the emergence of the different evidential and mirative constructions studied. Furthermore, these raising verbs share a further characteristic, as all of them seem to be developing extra-clausal parenthetical uses. In turn, the parenthetical expression 'needless to say' functions as an evidential strategy used to express evidentiality from assumption. Having its origins in Early Modern English, the thorough analysis of the emergence of 'needless to say' lets us assess the role of frequency and trace the processes whereby evidential pragmatic inferences become conventionalized over time. Even though English and Spanish do not possess evidentiality and mirativity as inflectional grammatical categories—i.e. these categories cannot be compartmentalized in an inflectional paradigm of (obligatory) morphological affixes like tense or number—the constructions examined in this dissertation are proven to fulfill grammatical functions analogous to those displayed by evidential and mirative morphology in those languages that possess it.