‘Exclamative’ and ‘quotative’ illocutionary complementisers in Catalan, European Portuguese and Spanish

Abstract

The use of the Ibero-Romance complementiser que in non-embedded contexts with various illocutionary functions is argued to be non-trivially distinct from its canonical function as a marker of subordination. Interpretative and grammatical differences, and variation in the availability and clause-typing of non-embedded ‘exclamative’ and ‘quotative’ illocutionary que across Catalan, European Portuguese and Spanish provide evidence that the subordinating complementiser has been repurposed for the representation of pragmatic information in the complementiser systems of Ibero-Romance, a hypothesis supported by analogies drawn between illocutionary que and illocutionary functions of the interrogative complementiser si/se in Catalan and European Portuguese.

Exclamatives as responses at the syntax-pragmatics interface

“…As one anonymous reviewer notes, this analysis of the complementizer 'that' is further corroborated by the fact that the Catalan complementizer que can introduce polar questions (seePrieto and Rigau, 2007;Corr, 2018;and Feldhausen and Villalba, 2020):…”

“…Note that both cases could in principle be indirect ways 1 We hasten to point out that there is a lot more to say about the morphosyntax of the construction we refer to as that-exclamatives. For instance, such conଏgurations have been discussed as cases of 'insubordination' in the literature and/or pointed out in the context of 'illocutionary' complementizers (Evans, 2007;Truckenbrodt, 2006;Gras and Sansineena, 2017;D'Hertefelt, 2018;Corr, 2018;Ceong, 2019;and many more). However, a cross-linguistic discussion of those claims and analyses and how they relate to our comparison between Catalan and German would take as too far aଏeld in this paper.…”

Evidentiality in Spoken Catalan. The Evidential Marker Diu Que

“…'Parsley, I have also heard people say too, that they put parsley down there, around the vagina, that they say that they put parsley.' The insubordinate que has been regarded as a quotative or reportative evidential in Catalan (Corr 2018) and in Spanish (Spitzer 1942;Etxepare 2008Etxepare , 2010Demonte & Fernández-Soriano 2013Gras 2016;Corr 2018). As for Spanish, Demonte & Fernández-Soriano (2013) consider that the insubordinate que is a reportative evidential and that it can have no epistemic values.…”