‘Se pá’: An epistemic conditional!

Abstract

The article aims to present a semantic-pragmatic proposal for the expression ‘se pé’, characteristic of the speech of younger communities in Brazil. In written texts, such as whatsapp or twitter, it appears spelled in different ways: ‘cepá’, ‘sepá’, ‘cpá’ and etc... We argue that it is a compositional expression, in which ‘se’ is the conjunction conditional and the ‘pá’ takes the place of the antecedent. We initially argue that we are not facing a possibility operator like ‘talvez’ (maybe), but an indicative conditional, since it does not combine with forms of the verb in the subjunctive. We show, relying on Potts (2007), that ‘pá’ carries expressiveness, conveying the subjective position of the speaker. For the semantics, we start from Kratzer’s (2012) proposal for conditionals in which the ‘se’ (if) indicates that the restriction of universal quantification, which is implicit, is given by the antecedent. The antecedent is occupied by ‘pá’, which is the proposition that contains what is the normal course of events. The modal base is the worlds accessible from the evaluation world, which are ordered according to normalcy. The ‘pá’ is the proposition that summarizes the normal conditions. Thus, the speaker indicates that if everything is normal, the consequence will follow. Therefore, not only is he inclined in the direction of the consequent, but the expressiveness of the expression conveys that the speaker is emotionally inclined in that direction.