Elena Felíu Arquiola

De modificador aspectual a atenuador oracional

This study provides new data on the evolution of medio along the history of the Spanish language both from a distributional and a semantic point of view. With respect to the distributional perspective, this work shows, using data from Corpus del espanol, that the adverb medio extended its combinatorial possibilities throughout the centuries, from a small initial group of lexical categories to a larger lexical group and also to syntagmatic categories, including the clause or the sentence. As for the semantic perspective, this paper shows how this distributional extension involves a semantic change: medio evolved from aspectual to evaluative modifier and finally, in the twentieth century, to attenuator of sentence modality, understood in a broad sense.