On how the relative construction in Spanish artículo + cual works

Abstract

The article analyzes the use of the relative structure el cual, la cual, los cuales, las cuales, and lo cual in oral discourse and unplanned writing. Its purpose is to demonstrate that this use differs from standard writing in Spanish, because it covers other communicative functions, which involve a grammatical change as it empties the use of these phrases of syntactic characteristics. It is then possible to draw a continuum of grammatical forms for clause connection covering from the prototypical hypotactic uses of the construction in question to discourse consecutive connectives.