La expresión epistémica <i>si cuadra</i> en español de Galicia

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse the use of the expression si cuadra as a marker of epistemic possibility in Galician Spanish. The hypothesis to be explored explains the use of this expression as a result of a transfer or calque of the Galician adverbial se cadra, which has been documented in that language from the 19th century onward. The Spanish data, extracted from corpora as well as from the internet, reveal that si cuadra is used in different varieties of Spanish as a reduced parenthetical clause in the form of a conditional protasis, meaning ‘if it is convenient’ (in general Spanish) or as ‘if it is timely’ (at least in the Spanish spoken in the north-western Peninsula and on the Canary Islands). The comparison between the adverbial and the reduced parenthetical clause from which it derives allows for the identification of the syntactic changes that motivate the fixation and adverbialisation of the construction. As regards the origin of the semantics of the adverbial, the paper analyses data on the verbs calhar in Portuguese, cadrar in Galician and cuadrar in Spanish, all expressing ‘convenience’, and postulates that, rather than being based on the sense of ‘convenience’ as ‘appropriateness’ (‘to suit’, see Pinto de Lima 2008 for Portuguese), the meaning of the adverbial is based on the expression of ‘convenience’ in the sense of ‘chance’ or ‘coincidence’. This postulate is in agreement with the analysis proposed by López Couso & Méndez Naya (2017) for some epistemic possibility expressions in English. The present study is based on data from various corpora, most importantly TILG for Galician and CdP for Portuguese, as well as CdE, ESLORA and the corpora of the Royal Academy for Spanish.