The Spanish Synthetic Future as a Means of Expression of Inference

The present paper analyses the inferential use of the Spanish synthetic future form, i.e. examples in which the future is used as an inferential marker. The examples are retrieved from the search engine GlossaNet, more precisely, from the Spanish daily newspapers El País and El Mundo. This study does not aim to be a quantitative one. It is a qualitative study where the data are used to verify/refute the theoretical basis. It is, for example, not my intention to show in how many cases of a certain total amount of uses the Spanish synthetic future form is used to express inference. It is argued that the label “inferential future” (instead of “epistemic future”) should be preferred. Additionally, the synthetic future is shown to convey inferences of different strengths: será + sin duda (“it will/must be + without a doubt”), for instance, represents a stronger inference, while with será + probablemente (“it will/must be + probably”) a weaker inference is expressed

El marcador (yo) pienso (que) y sus diferentes funciones

In this paper, the different uses and functions of (yo) pienso (que) are analysed. The examples demonstrate that (yo) pienso (que) fulfils various functions. It is used as a marker of cognitive attitude concerning the proposition (that is, the speaker expresses his validative attitude or an inference), as a pragmatic marker or as a cognitive particle. In this study, we introduce the term ‘cognitive particle’ in order to describe the use of (yo) pienso (que) when its use serves to gain time in processing the enunciation or to structure the speaker’s thoughts. The empirical data are on the one hand retrieved from the corpus programme CREA, of debates and interviews focusing on peninsular Spanish, and on the other hand from GlossaNet, more precisely from the newspapers El País and El Mundo. This analysis is a qualitative one because we do not focus on the frequency of the different functions. Instead, we want to illustrate the various functions (yo) pienso (que) fulfils

A cognitive-constructionist approach to Spanish creo Ø and creo yo ‘[I] think’

AbstractThe present study approaches the Spanish postposed constructions</jats:p

Topic and Focus Markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French

This book is concerned with the diachronic development of selected topic and focus markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French. On the one hand, it focuses on the development of these structures from their relational meaning to their topic-/ focus-marking meaning, and on the other hand, it is concerned with their current form und use. Thus, Romance topic and focus markers – such as sp. en cuanto a, pt. a propósito de, fr. au niveau de or sentence-initial sp. Lo que as well as clefts and pseudo-clefts – are investigated from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The author argues that topic markers have procedural meaning and that their function is bound to their syntactic position. An important contribution of this study is the fact that real linguistic evidence (in the form of data from various corpora) is analyzed instead of operating with constructed examples