"Taxonomic nouns and markers of mitigation in Río de la Plata Spanish"

KORNFELD, LAURA

Type Noun Constructions in Slavic, Germanic and Romance Languages. Semantics and pragmatics on the move

Mouton de Grutyter

Lugar: Berlín; Año: 2023; p. 415 - 453

This paper aims at characterizing "tipo (que)", a very frequent expression in colloquial varieties of Río de la Plata Spanish and particularly (but not only) among young people. In general Spanish, "tipo" is a polysemic noun; one of its lexical-conceptual meanings is taxonomic and can be paraphrased as ´type´, ´style´ or ´kind´, as in "sangre del tipo A" [´blood of the tipo [type] A´] or "una película del tipo documental" [´a film of the tipo [type] documentary´]. A first step in the process of grammaticalization occurs when the preposition and determiner are omitted: "una película tipo documental" [´a film tipo [type] documentary´]. Here, "tipo" heads an apposition and retains (part of) its classifying lexical meaning (´type´ or ´kind´), but it is also able to be interpreted with a comparative or approximative (i.e. a functional) meaning, as English like (Mihatsch 2018). The comparative or approximative interpretation seems to be obligatory in certain sentences (exclusive of Río de la Plata Spanish), as is Dice cosas tipo los profesores [´She says things tipo [like] the professors´]. Parting from these nominal uses, "tipo" appears in other categorial domains with approximative and, eventually, attenuation meaning in Río de la Plata Spanish, particularly among young people. Thus, we recognize different uses of tipo as a mitigator, i.e., an expression intended to weaken the impact of the meaning of a word or of the whole assertion (cf. Caffi 1999, Montecino 2004): "Voy tipo 4" [´I´m going tipo [like] 4´] (quantificational scope), "Es tipo re/ muy / demasiado malo" [´He´s tipo [like] very/ too bad´] (adjectival scope), "Va tipo lento" [´She goes tipo [like] slow(ly)´] (adverbial scope), "Tipo (que) no me interesó" [´Tipo que [like] it didn´t interest me´] (sentential scope) (cf. Kornfeld 2013). We focus on the cases in which "tipo" functions as a sentential marker of mitigation, trying to explain its distribution and its compatibility with different modalities, moods, polarities, contexts of subordination, etc., in order to describe its basic grammatical properties. In particular, we discuss which differences exist between "tipo (que)" and the modality markers that express epistemic doubt ("por ahí", "capaz", "a lo mejor", ´perhaps/ maybe´, cf. Di Tullio & Kornfeld 2013), that can also be used, occasionally, as mitigators. We also establish the differences and similarities between "tipo" and other close mitigators in the colloquial Río de la Plata Spanish: while como (que) is originally a comparative conjuction (i.e., a functional word), we argue that "onda (que)" and, in the last decades, "corte (que)" are also polysemic nouns that, parting from a taxonomic meaning, suffer a process of grammaticalization. Interestingly, these expressions have different distributions in terms of age groups, social classes and even registers.In sum, the colloquial varieties of Río de la Plata Spanish provide several examples of expressions that, parting from a taxonomic meaning, end on being mitigators with sentential scope. This paper intends to analyze these cases, focusing on "tipo" in order to illustrate the process in a detailed way.