Deixis proposicional en el habla de Caracas: Un análisis cuantitativo del (DE)QUEíSMO

this study examines the de que/que structures (hereafter (de)queísmo) in spanish spoken in caracas. the hypothesis underlying this research is that the presence of the preposition de is a type of evidential marker (schwenter 1999). spanish does not have a grammatical category for evidentiality; de haan (in press) suggests that evidentials should be analyzed as a deictic category which situates the action described in the proposition with respect to the speaker. the purpose of this research is to determine, by means of a quantitative study in variation contexts, the deictic properties that speakers tend to signal when they insert de before the conjunction que, so as to specify the possible use of the preposition as a propositional deictic and its social distribution in spanish speakers in caracas. the corpus sociolingüístico de caracas 1987 was analyzed with the help of the statistical sofware goldvarb 2001. findings indicate that speakers tend to use the preposition de before the conjunction que in order to project themselves as the epistemic center, indicating direct evidence and a high degree of reliability for the contents of the subordinate clause.