The Grammatical Expression ‘lo que pasa es que’ in Spanish. Contrastive Study of PRESEEA-Palma and PRESEEA-Alcalá

Abstract

The form lo que pasa es que has been grammaticalized in Spanish and now also has a procedural meaning that is quite frequent in everyday speech. Nonetheless, there is still little knowledge about the discursive functions of this expression in the interaction, the variants it presents, and the social factors that influence its usage. In this research, we present a study that attempts to answer these questions in two Spanish-speaking communities: Palma and Alcalá de Henares. To do this, we analyzed two PRESEEA corpus of these cities to establish the patterns of use of the different variants of lo que pasa es que. The main conclusions of the study suggest that lo que pasa es que presents four different discursive functions in the interaction: contrastive, clarifying/justificatory, concessive and objection/denial; that some of the variants of this grammaticalized form represent some functions better than others; that extralinguistic factors, such as origin or ethnolinguistic group, have a special influence on the production and selection of forms; and that, normally, the conjunction of the independent variables of the study is what determines the use of the expression.