The Expressive Function of the ni que Insubordinate Construction in Spanish

Authors such as Tyler Schnoebelen (on page 12 of his study Emotions are Relational: Positioning and the Use Affective Linguistic Resources), suggest that in some languages (cf. Navajo), certain dependent clauses frequently used independently to “mark emotional evaluation background information”. Evans, work on insubordination its uses, makes use term refer this phenomenon. Our focuses a particular insubordinate construction introduced by sequence ni que Spanish, example [¡Una carta cada día!] Ni yo fuese Umbral. (CORPES Corpus), an independent clause with sociopragmatic meaning, which is different from subordinate counterpart No escribiría una día Umbral). research questions ask about potential for be discourse marker fulfilling expressive function when it introduces type construction, derived hypothesis then oriented test whether Schnoebelen’s observation constructions also applies Spanish construction. In order hypothesis, we performed functional analysis more than 2000 concordances (and their extended contexts) Mark Davies’ Corpus del Español Real Academia CORPES XXI. findings show differs meaning counterpart, former emotive function, often combined other discourse–pragmatic functions, or organization discourse.