Pragmaticalization via Vague and Light Nouns: The Case of Spanish <i>rollo</i>

This paper explores the semantic-pragmatic evolution of European Spanish rollo in colloquial speech during the twentieth century. First, it aims at explaining the semantic changes: what syntactic-lexical patterns rollo acquired, in which social-cultural contexts these were developed and how they occurred (via metaphor/ metonymy). Second, it tries to clarify its pragmaticalization as a pragmatic marker by examining the semantic-syntactic properties that made possible this step. To do this, I collected a large corpus data including texts with a colloquial style dated from the 1940s to 2020s. The findings reveal that rollo evolved into a catch-all noun, acquiring a vague meaning and behaving as a light noun in the youth sociolect throughout the 1970s. This profile paved the way for the later pragmaticalization as a marker with a wide repertoire of pragmatic and discourse functions. All these uses can be grouped under the umbrella category of intentional vagueness posited by Voghera.