Truly Asserting and Truly Committing: Truth-Based Speech Act Operators in Spanish

This article presents a case study on two Spanish modifiers, la verdad and de verdad, which share the lexical base verdad ‘truth’ but demonstrate distinct distributions and functions. We argue that these modifiers operate on different layers of the speech act structure, adopting the recent model by Krifka (2023, 2024). Corpus data show la verdad is less frequent, restricted to peripheral positions, and exclusively modifies assertions. De verdad is more frequent, syntactically mobile, and appears in various speech acts (assertions, questions, exclamations). We propose that de verdad is a modifier of the commitment operator, specifying the commitment event as truthful, resulting in a strengthening effect, while la verdad is a modifier of the assertion operator, specifying the act of asserting as truthful, which often relates to politeness. This distinction in the proposed analysis accounts for their differing distributional profiles and semantic effects.