Subjectivació i evidencialitat: El verb "amenaçar" fins al segle XIX. Un estudi de corpus

Abstract

In current Catalan, the verb amenaçar possess, together with a lexical meaning (with agentive subject), an evidential auxiliary value (according to Cornillie 2016) that gives way to productions such as: amenaçava de ploure (diec2, s.v. amenaçar, 3; ddlc, s.v. amenaçar, 5). The unfolding of this value has been explained, in the case of English (as epistemic: Traugott 1997) and in Spanish (Cornillie 2007, 2016; Cornillie and Octavio de Toledo 2015) with the concept of subjectivation (according to Traugott and Dasher 2002). Following this line of research, in this study we try to describe and explain the process of change, in which the aforementioned verb will develop, in Catalan, an epistemic/evidential value during the Early Modern period, in a process that will culminate in the 19^th century. The investigation will be based on the emptying and analysis of computerized textual corpus data of ancient, modern and contemporary Catalan. The data obtained will be analysed qualitatively and quantitatively, and interpreted using the theoretical tools that the Cognitive Linguistics and the Usage-Based Construction Grammar provides, according to Traugott and Trousdale (2013) and Traugott’s Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC) (2012).