The purpose of this paper is to characterize, from the perspective of generative grammar, two expressions associated with mood that appear in Spanish in contact with Guarani (especially in Paraguay): lento and un poco, which are correlated with similar forms used in Rioplatense Spanish and in Guarani. In particular, we explore the possibility of analysing both elements as ‘attenuators’, which are described by the pragmatic-grammatical literature as elements that are used to mitigate or relativize the impact of the assertions in a specific strategy of politeness (cfr. Caffi 1999), or to deactivate the illocutive force of an act (Landone 2009). We believe that the notion of attenuation cannot be subsumed into other grammatical features, as ‘possibility’ or ‘approximation’, both related to the epistemic mood, and that it can be integrated in a generative analysis, in particular,
in the cartographic analysis summarized in Cinque & Rizzi (2016), combined with the proposal of the categorial projections Sv, Sa, Sn in the framework of Distributed Morphology (cf. Marantz 2001).
Keywords:
modalidad, atenuación, español paraguayo, español rioplatense-contacto de lenguas
Kornfeld, L., & Avellana, A. (2019). An analysis of lento and un poco as attenuative markers in paraguayan spanish, contrasted with rioplantese spanish. Lenguas Modernas, (52), pp. 187–213. Retrieved from https://revistas.uchile.cl/index.php/LM/article/view/52852
