Chapter 8. French j’imagine , Spanish me imagino

Abstract

French imaginer and Spanish imaginar start to appear during the second half of the 13th century. Initially, these verbs remain closely linked to the corresponding nouns image and imagen, their prevailing meaning being ‘form a picture’. After the 14th century, a second meaning, ‘suppose’, gradually begins to develop. The spread of the ‘suppose’ meaning favors, among other things, the appearance of detached constructs, that is, deverbal discourse markers (Schneider 2020a, 2022), in the first person present indicative singular. From the 17th century to the 19th century, in these detached constructs, French imaginer is regularly preceded by a subject pronoun and a reflexive pronoun, whereas Spanish imaginar occurs without pronouns. In the 20th century and beginning 21st century, the French deverbal discourse marker without reflexive almost completely supplants the one with reflexive. In contrast, the recent development of imaginar in Spanish goes in the opposite direction, with me imagino replacing imagino as deverbal discourse marker. Hence, for centuries, French and Spanish maintained a specific contrast regarding the discourse marker construction with imaginer and imaginar: presence of the reflexive pronoun in French, absence of the reflexive pronoun in Spanish. In the course of the 20th century, this contrast seems to have reversed. The present study seeks to provide additional data both from written and spoken corpora and also addresses the question of whether the absence or, respectively, presence of the reflexive pronoun in the discourse marker construction represents a merely superficial and formal phenomenon or is due to a deeper structural and semantic difference.