Mester

Abstract: According to Silva-Corvalán (Ahora 67), the discourse marker ahora in Chilean Spanish has undergone a process of grammaticalization or subjectification, defined as a part of speech that changes away from objective description of the external situation and towards the expression of the speaker’s internal perspective or attitude (Torres Cacoullos and Schwenter 347). However, according to Silva Corvalán (Ahora 72), a lack of diachronic data makes it difficult to evince a change of this type. The present paper provides evidence for her hypothesis through the analysis of four interview transcriptions of middle-upper class Chilean speakers from El habla culta de Santiago de Chile: one male and one female in their late 20s, and one male and one female in their mid-60s. These interviews were published in 1979, and through an analysis of the data from Silva-Corvalán’s 1999 study as well as the use of ahora by these four speakers, I show that ahora may have already begun to undergo a process of subjectification at that time.