This book is concerned with the diachronic development of selected topic and focus markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French. On the one hand, it focuses on the development of these structures from their relational meaning to their topic-/ focus-marking meaning, and on the other hand, it is concerned with their current form und use. Thus, Romance topic and focus markers – such as sp. en cuanto a, pt. a propósito de, fr. au niveau de or sentence-initial sp. Lo que as well as clefts and pseudo-clefts – are investigated from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The author argues that topic markers have procedural meaning and that their function is bound to their syntactic position. An important contribution of this study is the fact that real linguistic evidence (in the form of data from various corpora) is analyzed instead of operating with constructed examples.

This study adopts a context-sensitive and functional approach to the qualitative analysis of Spanish linguistic means that are used to convey evidential meanings. Verbs of cognitive attitude, modal adverbs, modal verbs, the Spanish conditional and the synthetic future are analysed against the background of pragmatics. GlossaNet, a search engine that supports the researcher to build a corpus, was used to collect the examples analysed in this study. Furthermore, as evidentiality is - at least in Spanish - a linguistic category that overlaps with other semantic-functional categories, namely epistemic modality, deixis, subjectivity and polyphony, it is argued that the superordinate category speaker's perspectivisation should be imposed on these categories.

Este volumen reune dieciseis contribuciones, de nueve autoras y doce autores, que abordan el tema de la interconexion, interaccion y el solapamiento de las categorias semantico-funcionales de la temporalidad, aspectualidad, modalidad y evidencialidad, que representa un fenomeno bastante complejo en el espanol.En algunas contribuciones se plantean modelos teoricos para explicar la interaccion de estas categorias, en otras se aprovecha el trabajo linguistico de corpus para describir su interconexion y solapamiento desde una perspectiva sincronica, diacronica y de la ensenanza del espanol como lengua extranjera y en relacion a otras lenguas europeas, y en otras se describe la variacion y funcion linguistica con respecto a su entrelazamiento y solapamiento tanto en el espanol peninsular y en sus variedades en comparacion como en el espanol americano en contacto con lenguas indigenas y en el papiamentu.

Die angewandte Linguistik ist per definitionem eine interdisziplinare Wissenschaft. Sie berucksichtigt nicht nur rein sprachliche, sondern auch pragmatische, soziale und psychologische Dimensionen bei der Beschreibung und Analyse sprachlicher AEusserungen. Dieser Sammelband vereint sprach- und kulturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen von Diskursen sowie Beitrage zur Lexikalisierung, Grammatikalisierung und Entwicklung von Sprachtheorien. La linguistique appliquee est per definitionem une science interdisciplinaire. Elle ne prend pas seulement en consideration la dimension langagiere, mais elle s'occupe aussi des dimensions pragmatique, sociale et psychologique dans la description et l'analyse des expressions linguistiques. Ce volume reunit des recherches linguistiques et culturelles sur differentes formes de discours, ainsi que des contributions sur la lexicalisation, la grammaticalisation et le developpement des theories.