De aquella manera tiene su aquel. Emergencia de un “marcador aproximativo” en el español del siglo XXI

The present article deals with the adverbial expression de aquella manera (‘in that manner’) as an “approximative marker” in 21st century Spanish. The development of this expression fits the grammaticalization paths, but, at the same time, poses some theoretical problems regarding the triggering of the change. The main issue tackles the transformation of a grammatical element (the demonstrative aquel) in (a part of) a lexical item, so that the observation of this change permits to explore the influence of deixis on grammaticalization processes. Data are extracted from oral and written corpus of 21st century Spanish samples. Thus, this article is a first description of an element called to be a characterizing feature of third millennium Spanish.