Locational adverbs in non-spatial settings: The case of ahí in Colombian Spanish conversation

The Spanish 'locational‘ adverb system consists of five terms — aquí, acá, allí, allá and ahí — traditionally divided into two sets, those ending in i and those ending in a. They are often analysed as consisting of terms indicating location close to speaker (aquí, acá), close to hearer (ahí), and distant from both (allí, allá); or as two proximate, one medial and two distal locational terms. However, it has been suggested that, at least in some varieties of Spanish, the distinction between ahí and allí is not one of distance, but rather relates to semantic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic factors. An analysis of the use of the locational adverbs in a corpus of conversational Colombian Spanish confirms this and reveals that the distance distinction between aquí, ahí and allí is no longer the driving force in the use of ahí in Colombian Spanish. Ahí has generalised in meaning such that it is overwhelmingly the most frequently used spatial adverb (accounting for 40% of the close to 700 tokens of these five adverbs analysed here). In a spatial sense, it refers not just to medial distance, but also regularly denotes proximal and distal locations. Furthermore, over one third of the tokens of ahí in the data occur in non-spatial senses. In this paper we consider in detail the non-spatial uses of ahí in spontaneous discourse, and hypothesise the paths by which semantic extension may have lead to the current functions of ahí.