“Register plays no role in the following Spanish construction”, dijo nadie nunca

Using a corpus of Spanish tweets, this study offers an analysis of the [ dijo nadie nunca ] construction, an expression of ironic negation. This paper defends the argument that the [ dijo nadie nunca ] construction is modeled upon the English ‘said no one ever’, and has been adapted in Spanish through a remote language contact situation. Specifically, this study demonstrates that there is a register effect at play that shapes the linguistic outcome of the pragmatic borrowing. This analysis sheds new light on novel forms regarding negative concord in Spanish and makes the argument that register effects can modulate the linguistic outcomes of a given borrowing.