Entre la sintaxis y el discurso: el caso de 'a lo mejor' y 'al menos' en la conversación coloquial

Abstract

This paper studies the Spanish forms a lo mejor (maybe) and al menos (at least) from a modular perspective, revisiting the categorization of a lo major and al menos according to the involved linguistic level and analyzing the relations between the adverbial uses of these forms and the discursive ones. Such relations show that the forms a lo mejor and al menos can be considered bicategorial lexical items, what is implemented by a corpus study based on data from spoken language.

Keywords

• a lo mejor
• al menos
• adverbs
• discourse markers
• discourse particles