An Emergent Apprehensional Epistemic Adverbial in Spanish

Abstract

The topic of this paper is an emergent Spanish adverbial, a lo peor, formed by analogy with a lo mejor ʻmaybeʼ. This novel adverbial constitutes an instance of an apprehensional epistemic (Lichtenberk, Frantisek. 1995. Apprehensional epistemics. In Joan Bybee & Suzanne Fleischman (eds.), Modality in grammar and discourse, 293–327. Amsterdam: John Benjamins); that is, it expresses epistemic possibility together with a negative attitude towards the hypothetical state-of-affairs. We discuss its status as an emergent construction and develop a corpus-based descriptive approximation that extends previous notes on the adverbial by considering patterns of usage and aspects of syntax, as well as observations about diatopic and diaphasic variation. We further discuss the motivation for the coinage of a lo peor as well as the exact process of analogy formation, applying both a language-internal perspective and a cross-linguistic one. Lastly, we compare our findings on a lo peor to typological observations on the functions and evolution of apprehensional epistemics.