Temporal constraints in the use of demonstratives in Iberian Spanish

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Natural linguistic data show that a close relationship exists among demonstratives and time in Spanish. Such connection appears to be of a pragmatic nature whereby linguistic expressions that encode or denote time license the use of demonstratives under certain conditions. Generally speaking, these linguistic expressions or licensors contribute to setting up adequate temporal frames of reference for a felicitous use of demonstratives. Although grammatical tense appears to be the principal type of licensing expression other linguistic elements (i.e. adverbials, noun phrases, etc.) also play an important role in establishing the reference time of the discourse. The aforementioned connection time-demonstration occurs when speakers employ demonstratives to refer to objects within the textual world (i.e. discourse referents). In this paper I explore the temporal constraints that impose restrictions in the use of demonstratives in Spanish and argue in favor of characterizing the relationship timedemonstration as a discourse deixis phenomenon in close connection with time deixis. The co-referential link that gets established between the demonstrative and the temporal expression is formalized and a presuppositional characterization is proposed for the three demonstratives in their discourse-deictic use.Keywords. Time, demonstratives, text, anaphora, reference, deixis, discourse RESUMEN. El análisis de datos lingüísticos naturales muestra que existe una estrecha correlación entre los demostrativos y el tiempo en español. En dicha conexión, de naturaleza aparentemente pragmática, las expresiones que denotan tiempo facilitan el uso de demostrativos bajo ciertas condiciones. En general, estas expresiones lingüísticas contribuyen a establecer el marco de referencia temporal adecuado para el uso del demostrativo. Aunque el tiempo verbal parece ser el tipo principal de elementos que facilitan el uso del demostrativo, los adverbios y ciertas expresiones nominales también contribuyen a establecer la referencia temporal del discurso. La conexión tiempo-demostrativo tiene lugar cuando el hablante emplea el demostrativo para referir a referentes del discurso. En este trabajo se exploran las restricciones temporales que afectan al uso de los demostrativos en español y se propone una caracterización para la conexión tiempo-demostrativos como un fenómeno de deixis discursiva en estrecha relación con la deixis temporal. Se formaliza el vínculo correferencial que se establece entre el demostrativo y la expresión temporal en contextos narrativos y se propone una caracterización presuposicional de los demostrativos en su uso deíctico discursivo.Palabras clave. Tiempo, demostrativos, texto, anáfora, referencia, deixis, discurso * I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper.

Complement Anaphora in Spanish: Proportional References and Discourse Relations

“…Discourse structure and, more specifically, the rhetorical structure of discourse has been successfully applied to diverse anaphoric phenomena to date (see Alves, 2006;Zulaica-Hernández, 2009, 2012. Based on this approach to discourse, this section provides additional evidence to complement anaphora interpretation in Spanish arising from the (im)possibility of inferring rhetorical relations in discourses with quantified discourse segments.…”