Abstract: Some Observations Regarding the Functioning of the Adverb dizque, an Element of Diachronic and Diatopic Discontinuity in Spanish. The adverb dizque lies at the core of a double discontinuity in the landscape of the Spanish language. On the one hand, it marks a diachronic discontinuity, as its modal-epistemic and pragmatic values have developed significantly since the 13th century, when it was first registered in Old Spanish, with the evidential-reportative meaning that stems from its etymology. On the other hand, dizque is affected by a diatopic discontinuity, as it is becoming obsolete in the Iberian Peninsula, but is extremely productive in Hispanic American varieties. This paper traces the evolution of the modal and discursive values of dizque and observes its syntactic behaviour by means of a corpus analysis, concluding that, in today’s Hispanic American Spanish, this adverb has reinforced this position in the left periphery, either as a sentence modifier or as a constituent modifier, with clearly established syntactic peculiarities.

Keywords: evidentiality, epistemic, syntax, pragmatics