The semantic and pragmatic extensions of the Spanish conditional

The evolution of the Spanish conditional form has yielded a variety of temporal, modal and evidential meanings. However, there is no comprehensive typology of the newly evolved uses of the conditional that do not fit into the existing classifications and that accounts for the emergence of new meanings. This project sets out to provide an exhaustive classification of the meanings and uses of the Spanish conditional form and to determine the directionality of semantic change and the processes of grammaticalization in the evolution of the form since the beginning of the 20th century. The project will also investigate semantic and pragmatic extensions that have emerged in the recent past, especially in the variety of Spanish spoken in and around the Río de la Plata Basin. Examples include constructions such as Estaría necesitando dormir una década (‘I need to sleep for a decade’; Lit. I would be needing to sleep for a decade) and No andaría aguantando a mis vecinos (‘I can’t stand my neighbors’; Lit. I would not go standing my neighbors), among others, which are increasingly frequent, especially on online media. These constructions seem to parody the hearsay or ‘rumor’ conditional to express the speaker’s subjective standpoint or judgment. The aim of this project is, firstly, to describe the form and meaning features of these and other new uses, to account for their development, and to delineate their pervasiveness across varieties of Spanish. The analysis will be guided by a theoretical approach which combines principles of Construction Grammar and Interactional Linguistics and will follow a usage-based perspective in a set of qualitative and quantitative studies on synchronic and diachronic corpus data.