El tratamiento del estilo directo en la gramática del español desde 1917

Abstract

Direct style is a type of construction characterized by the concurrence in a single discourse what originally were two different ones, resulting in a structure made up of two elements: the introductory expression and the quotation. One of the most controversial issues among grammarians is the relationship between the two members of the direct style, which has given rise to hypotheses that are radically opposed: from hypotaxis and parataxis to the merely discursive relationship and, therefore, the absence of syntactic relationship. It is interesting to make a review of the different characterizations that the direct style has received in the grammatical studies of Spanish that shows the need to reorient some postulates towards other possible avenues of research, which emerge in other languages, especially English, and which may be useful when it comes to portraying a type of construction that does not quite fit into the requirements of the Spanish language. For this, the critical analysis of the subject is approached and certain postulates of the Construction Grammar are proposed as a basis to explain the particular relationship between members of the direct style, which go through the conception of constructions as symbolic units, associations of signifier and signified, with its own semantic value independent of that of the words that compose it.