Gramática e historia textual en la evolución de los marcadores discursivos. El caso de no obstante

Abstract

The study of no obstante ('notwithstanding') has been affected by some theoretical preconceptions, which have influenced both the explanation of its emergence as a grammatical device in Castilian language and its description in contemporary Spanish. These misguided descriptions have been motivated by the use of our current grammatical intuition, which considers no obstante the result of a Latin heritage. The entailment to Latin has supported, also, the description of no obstante + NP as an absolute construction. Moreover, the influence of the Theory of Crammaticalization, which usually does not pay much attention to the textual conditions of grammatical forms production, has favoured the neglect of textual contexts that give rise to the Castilian discourse marker no obstante. In this paper, we try to demonstrate that, in the sequences no obstante + NP and no obstante que, no obstante has been reanalyzed as being only a grammatical element with a prepositional function. Further, we deal with the evidence that, in spite of its Latin form, no obstante was introduced into Castilian language via Catalan or Aragonese languages.