ApenasVerión final Impresa J. Benjamins.pdf

This paper explores both the polysemy and the development of the adverb apenas‘barely hardly’ into a discourse marker of temporal proximity ‘just/recently’.In contrast to well-known expected tendencies in grammaticalization, apenasruns against the cannon. The subjective adverb apenas, that designates eventscarried out “with e"ort/diffculty”, changed into an objective connector signalingimmediacy among events or proximity to the time of speech. The polysemyof apenas is accounted for both synchronically and diachronically, as the interactionbetween the force-dynamics configuration of the marker (Talmy, 1985,1988) and the aspectual configuration of the verb. It is proposed that aspect determinesthe degree of subjectivity of the event where telicity triggers objectiverepresentations and these, in turn, led the way for the emergence of a discourse marker of temporal proximity.