DOI 10.1515/ling-2013-0061 Linguistics 2014; 52(1): 225 – 266 Jessi Elana Aaron* and Maria Fionda Getting closer: Codifcation of subjective semantic prosody in Spanish continuative aspect Folklore says syntax has a mind of its own, and does not need semantics. I wish to add here: the same goes for semantics! I agree that semantics is not what Montague Grammar makes us believe it is [. . .]. But I do not agree that sentence structures cannot be motivated from semantics. Even if we grant that syntax has its own way, the fact that at the end of the day we want to communicate certain meanings will put pressure on language to put up with the requirements of semantics. In other words: both syntax and semantics will have certain intrinsic properties, and they will conspire to produce the systems that we call natural lan- guages. (Kracht 2007: 51) Abstract: The syntactic correlates of the diachronic process of subjectifcation within grammatical constructions, unlike that of discourse markers and connec- tives, do not include a cancellation of syntax. This can make the identifcation of subjectifcation within some grammaticalization processes difcult to identify. Pairs of purportedly synonymous constructions, such as continuative aspectual markers in Spanish, ofer an ideal site to explore how certain linguistic contexts, through frequency, can come to be associated with more or less subjectivity. Six forms are included in this study: the phasal adverbs aún ‘still’ and todavía ‘still’ and the “phasal periphrastic” (Laca 2000) constructions including (semi-)auxiliaries: seguir ‘follow’ + Vndo and continuar ‘continue’ for positive polarity, and the corresponding seguir sin ‘follow without’ + INF and continuar sin ‘continue without’ + INF for negative polarity. In a variationist study of 481 occurrences of these forms from 1760–1860 in Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE) and 2762 occurrences from 1975–1980 from Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA), it is found that the diference between these “synonyms” is linked, on the one hand, to contextual elements indicative of subjectivity, and on the other, to register. Furthermore, it is suggested that variation due to difer- ing levels of subjectivity and register variation may share some characteristic pat- terns in the distribution of grammatical features. Keywords: Spanish, aspect, continuative, subjectivity, variation *Corresponding author: Jessi Elana Aaron: Spanish and Portuguese Studies, University of Florida, P.O. Box 117405, Gainesville, FL 32611-7405, USA. E-mail: jeaaron@ufl.edu Maria Fionda: Modern Languages, University of Mississippi, P.O. Box 1848, University, MS 38677-1848, USA. E-mail: mifonda@olemiss.edu Brought to you by | Purdue University Libraries Authenticated Download Date | 5/20/15 5:37 PM