This article traces the recent evolution of the linguistic item sabes ‘you know’ in contemporary Spanish. An in-depth diachronic corpus analysis based on a corpus of four trend samples of oral data from the seventies, eighties, nineties and the 21st century, shows that the contemporary use of sabes is the result of a grammaticalization process implying a series of functional and formal changes. This process has considerably accelerated in the 21st century, and the data demonstrate a gradual shift from the primarily conceptual interpersonal meaning of sabes to a more pragmatic and discourse-oriented one. This functional evolution correlates with a higher degree of fossilization of the form, and a more varied positional profile.
Key words:
grammaticalization, epistemic pragmatic marker, Spanish, recent language change
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