From Informational Status to Mitigation in Spanish Aunque Sea

Abstract

This paper focuses on the behavior of Spanish aunque sea—which originally emerges in a scalar concessive conditional protasis—as an operator meaning ‘at least’. More specifically, it is argued that aunque sea becomes an argumentative operator which reinforces the utterance where it appears through mitigation. Furthermore, the relationship between evidentiality and shared knowledge is revised, since the structure where the operator arises closely relates to the informational configuration. More broadly speaking, aunque sea can be considered a case of grammaticalization.