As Spain expanded its colonial empire, Spanish language and culture were introduced throughout the colonies. In this contribution, Ithe author explores the socio-historical factors that led to Spanish becoming a global language. From an evolutionary perspective, it is proposed that the arrival of an Old World cultural and linguistic community to the New World was the introduction of an invasive cultural and linguistic community into a new environment not equipped to handle it. This collision of cultures and languages led to an unintended result, the large-scale decimation of the indigenous communities, described by Diamond (1999: 354) as the ‘largest population replacement in the last 13,000 years'. Another, related consequence was that the Spanish language dominated during the colonial period, and since has continued to be the de facto main or exclusive language as the colonies became nation states. It has also been instrumental in a wide variety of political movements, as well as in the development of cultural expression. While being the second most widely spoken world language, Spanish regional varieties have emerged that reflect the local linguistic ecologies of areas where they are spoken.

This first chapter introduces the notions of theory of mind from cognitive psychology and the one of intersubjectivity from linguistics. It introduces the new speaker-centred notion of co-actionality. It provides an overview of the literature of both domains and finally defines the desiderata for a new gradient approach to analyse speakers’ ability to project their interlocutors’ potential reactions to what is being currently said. It lists a number of assumptions that will be discussed and empirically supported throughout the book: (1) Theory of Mind is communicated through overt intersubjective strategies and/or constructions, which vary in degrees of complexity. (2) Intersubjectivity is expressed linguistically as extra-propositional surplus of meaning that is additional to the perlocutionary effects of a linguistic act. (3) There is a unidirectional pathway of increased complexity of social cognition, ranging from co-actionality, to immediate intersubjectivity (I-I) to extended intersubjectivity (E-I). (4) This increasing complexity matches the evolutionary shift from dyadic to triadic and finally to collective intentionality. This cline can be traced both in language change and ontogenetic development. (5) Neuro-typical adult interactionis however includes utterances sometimes underpinning mere co-actionality, yet mostly hinging on immediate intersubjectivity and extended intersubjectivity. (6) Language change is an important indicator of a cognitive tendency toward polysemy and increasingly complex interactional functions that subserve human needs in a community of practice.

This second chapter defines the fundamental characteristics of intersubjective gradience through interaction, language change and ontogeny. It discusses the gradience dimension of intersubjectivity and the way increasing complexity of intersubjectified constructions and strategies can be operationally analysed and quantified. I illustrate an online and diachronic shift from basic co-actional interaction, to overtly communicated awareness of the mind of the interlocutor (immediate intersubjectivity, I-I) who is present during the here and now of the speech event, to more complex assumptions about common sense and inferred social behaviour (extended intersubjectivity, E-I). This shift in complexity of linguistic utterances matches the evolutionary-developmental model proposed in Tomasello (2019) whereby human evolution is, in turn, hypothesised to have been progressively acquiring abilities of dyadic intentionality, then shifting to triadic attention (i.e. including a common object of joint attention), to finally developing the more complex ability to infer and understand the collective intentions, conventions and set of beliefs of a social group.

In this last chapter I discuss the potential impact of the intersubjective gradience model on research in Cognitive Linguistics and Pragmatics. I explicitly refer to intersubjective gradience as a schematic mechanism. Abstract representation of immediate and extended interaction contribute to the formulation of linguistic acts as much as image schemata (i.a. Lakoff 1990; Mandler 1992; Di Maggio 1997) are hypothesised to trigger metaphorical thinking and determine the morpho-syntactical structure of grammatical constructions. I then show the applicability of the gradience model in Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) research and the way this usage-based framework can inform a fine-grained assessment of individuals’ ability to overtly express their awareness of an addressee’s potential reactions to what is being said. I finally summarise the main assumptions of the gradience model of intersubjectivity of this book.

This chapter is centred on interlocutors’ ability to spontaneously construe intersubjectified utterances throughout ontogeny and first language acquisition. The diachronic continuum illustrated in Chapter 3 is also at stake throughout children’s ontogenetic development. Children acquire the capacity to spontaneously express immediate intersubjectified (I-I) polysemies of a lexeme before they develop the skills to convey extended intersubjectified usages (E-I) of the same form. In Section 4.1 I introduce the application of the gradience model in first language acquisition and theory of mind research with reference to children's usage of the Italian construction guarda ‘look’. Section 4.2 focuses on the Mandarin construction 你看 nǐkàn ‘look, you see’ and the way new intersubjectified polysemies of 你看 nǐkàn (hinging on mirativity and opinion elicitation), significantly emerge at later stages of development than directive usages of the same form. In section 4.3 I discuss the acquisition of the Mandarin post-verbal 过 guo. Interpersonal evidential polysemies of 过 guo are spontaneously mastered by children around the seventh year of age, e.g. comparatively later than other usages of the same form. Section 4.4 is finally dedicated to the first language acquisition of the pre-nominal such and children’s progressive ability to use express generic reference to objects, entities and events to which they ascribe collective recognition. This extended intersubjective function of such emerges later than other polysemies of the same form aimed at merely establishing joint attention.

This chapter ‘puts the gradience model into play’ through a corpus-based application of the framework to semantic-pragmatic change in a number of constructions in American English, British English, Mandarin Chinese and other world languages. Each section is centred on a different construction diachronically acquiring new extended intersubjective (E-I) polysemies that progressively arise out of original literal usages. In a number of cases, an intermediate immediate intersubjective (I-I) stage of reanalysis can be formally identified in the sequence of changes of a construction. In some other instances, E-I polysemies may arise directly from literal usages of the construction. Section 3.1 touches upon the universality of intersubjectification as a ubiquitous process of change in the world languages. In Section 3.2, I then illustrate the continuum from immediate to extended intersubjectification of the 干嘛 ganma construction in Mandarin. Among the extended intersubjectified linguistic acts that I analyse in the chapter there is American English common-sense assertions of [you don't want X] (Section 3.3) and the attention-getting functions of the chunk believe it or not (Section 3.4). Extended intersubjectivity also intersects with evidential statements of shared knowledge through the usage of the Mandarin 过 guo construction (Section 3.5) and in assertions of expected agreement with the Mandarin sentence final particle 吧 ba (Section 3.6). Finally, I discuss the existential construction [ there is no X] in British English, which diachronically developed a new intersubjectified function to pre-emptively address what a speaker imagines a specific or generic interlocutor will say as a result of a current turn-taking.