My project aims to investigate the effects of the high string frequency of the Spanish 'dice que' which already in Medieval Spanish led to the strongly univerbalized form 'dizque' and is used as an evidential marker. However, this strategy to mark the source of information communicated, got lost in peninsular Spanish but became prominent in some varieties of Latin American Spanish (esp. Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia).
Until now the technical literature mainly presented 'dizque', as a socioculturally motivated phenomenon of language contact (Babel 2009 i.a.) or showed a general overview of the appearances of 'dizque' in historical corpora (Miglio 2010 i.a.). Yet, a closer look at both, historical data as well as synchronic corpora comprising data of language of proximity (oral and written) to trace the different grammaticalisation-paths that took 'dizque' in the varieties of Spanish since the Middle Ages, is still missing and thus shall be provided by this project.
The crucial factor for the development of 'dizque' as an evidential marker seems to be the influence of communicative genres and the possibilities and constraints that they provide respectively, to fulfill the requested communicative task.
The working hypothesis therefore is, that communicative genres are the catalyzers for the ongoing grammaticalisation process of 'dizque' in Latin America. Therefore it seems that high string frequency alone is not sufficient for modeling the lexicalisation and grammaticalisation processes in Latin American Spanish.