Temas ideacionales en oraciones deónticas en textos mexicanos (siglos XVIII al XXI)

Abstract

Sentences expressing rights and obligations; in legal discourse or in other discursive genres; tend to favor certain syntactic-semantic structures that show the speaker’s attitude towards the message and particularly towards directive acts. We explore the correlations between informative; syntactic; semantic and pragmatic levels in deontic constructions in Mexican Spanish in 18th to 21st centuries. We offer an analysis of the relation between thematic entities and their function at deontic level. The analysis shows that the participants as ideational theme in structures expressing rights or obligations are chosen according to different aspects: the kind of deontic participant refered to; its pragmatic function; the kind of allowed or prohibited situation expressed by the deontic operator and the ontological nature of the referent.