Outlining a grammaticalization path for the Spanish formula en plan (de): A contribution to crosslinguistic pragmatics

Abstract

AbstractThis article discusses the diachronic development of the Spanish multifunctional formula en plan (with its variant en plan de, literally ‘in plan (of)’ but usually equivalent to English like). The article has two main aims: firstly, to describe the changes that the formula has undergone since its earliest occurrences as a marker in the nineteenth century up to the early 21st century. The diachronic study evinces a process of grammaticalization in three steps: from noun to clause adverbial and then to discourse marker. Secondly, to conduct a contrastive analysis between en plan (de) and the English markers like and kind of/kinda so as to shed new light on the potential existence of a universal pathway of grammaticalization in the emergence of discourse markers.