When Perception Becomes Discourse: The Case of en/por lo que toca a in Spanish

This study examines the diachronic development of Spanish perception verbs into deverbal topic markers (DTMs), focusing on tocar (‘to touch’), e.g., en/por lo que toca a, as representative of sensory perception. While the grammaticalization of visual perception verbs into discourse markers (DMs) has been extensively documented, sensory verbs remain understudied. Drawing on data from three electronic corpora—CORDIAM, CORDE, and CORPES—this paper traces the semantic and syntactic evolution of these constructions from the 15th to the 21st century. There are three main conclusions: (a) the semantic development of tocar (‘to touch’) is driven by the interaction of metonymy and metaphor, corresponding to a process of metaphtonymy; (b) en/por lo que toca a arises through gradual grammaticalization processes, including semantic bleaching, decategorialization, increase in scope, and a positional shift toward the left periphery; (c) the corpus evidence suggests a gradual diffusion of the construction across textual genres, beginning in legal and administrative texts and later spreading to other registers.