A cognitive approach to the grammaticalization of the epistemic marker fijo

Abstract

The present paper has as its aim to show the semantic evolution of the form fijo through which it has acquired increasingly pragmatic uses and functions until it became an epistemic marker. Within this grammaticalization process, the cognitive procedures of metaphor and metonymy, as well as the general mechanism of subjectification, explain the semantic change experienced by this unit thanks to its appearance in certain contextual patterns which have conventionalized the epistemic value. Taking de fijo que, de fijo, and a punto fijo/fixo as our reference, the corpus study reveals that the variants of fijo code both the speaker’s epistemic commitment and evidential contents, even though each one of them conceptualizes the scene from a different perspective.