La gramaticalización de «quién quita (y)» como operador de duda en el español de México, Centroamérica y el Caribe

Abstract

We study in this work the creation of the doubt marker "quién quita (y)", which is found in the Spanish language of some American areas, especially in Mexico, Central America and the continental Caribbean (Colombia and Venezuela). The process starts with the routinization of rhetorical questions of the type "¿quién quita que…?", in which the verb "quitar" is used in the sense of 'prevent', 'hinder', already present in medieval Spanish, and which reach a high frequency in some territories while they are abandoned in others. In the areas in which the use of this type of interrogative was intense, the fixation of the sequence "quién quita", with the omission of the conjunction "que", led to its grammaticalization as an operator of doubt. We also study the phenomenon of divergence, the fact that the same sequence can present different values, the different formal variants of this doubt marker and the preference for one or the other in the different areas.