The verbal form I insist: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic description

The verb insistir occurs frequently in contemporary Spanish. This paper focuses on its form insisto and analyses its use in five corpora of spoken and written language (CORLEC, C-ORAL-ROM, CREA, HCM and HUSNC). The form is employed with or without complements or modifiers, the latter syntactic configuration predominating in the data. The form without complements or modifiers occurs in almost all positions within the sentence (initial, intermediate, final), is semantically reduced and is used mainly to underline and intensify the propositional content of (parts of) the utterance. These features suggest that insisto is developing into a discourse operator.