“Bien mirado”: Absolute Clause and Discourse Marker

This paper analyzes the construction bien mirado as a discursive marker. In the first part, based on the data provided by the CDH and CORPES corpora, we will examine the discursive functioning of bien mirado and the delimitation problems associated with the constructions of absolute clause or free adjunct, taking especially into account the notions of subject of predication, coreferentiality, the semantic relationship between the main clause introduced by bien mirado and the previous discursive element, the position (initial, medial, or final), the parenthetical character, as well as the argumentative and informative values, along with the reformulating one. In the second part, we will instead focus on the origins of the construction, on the contrastive historical delimitation with absolute clauses and on the frequency distribution, additionally developing a hypothesis about the subjectification process involved in discourse functioning – linked to the discursive character of absolute constructions, the parenthetical nature, and the meaning of mirar as a verb of thought or judgment.