European Portuguese lá: Use-Conditional Meaning and Pragmaticalization

Abstract

This study focusses on non-adverbial uses of lá in European Portuguese, whose exact meaning contribution still remains an open research question. Applying a multidimensional semantics framework, the central claim is that non-adverbial uses of lá represent use-conditional items. Passing the standard tests suggested in the literature, they thus do not contribute to the truth conditions of an utterance but specify particular use conditions. It is argued that they are felicitously used if a speaker wants to convey illocutionary modification, which pragmatically leads to mitigation or reinforcement effects. Diachronically, substantiated by historical data from the Corpus do Português, use-conditional lá is argued to be a product of a pragmaticalization process that led to so-called pragmatic fission at some point, i.e., to the polysemy of two synchronically available configurations of a truth-conditional and a use-conditional lá.