De la comparación a la modalidad y a la conexión. Variación regional, macrosintaxis y comportamiento discursivo de más vale como operador modal y como conector de reformulación.

This study is based on the use of valer (better, as its English translation) as a tertiopersonal verb introduced by the quantifier más (more, as its English translation) used in comparative structures in which the verb acts as main clause of subject subordinate clauses in the subjunctive or infinitive: Más vale/valdría que estudies/ estudiaras/estudiar (You’d better study/ It would be better if you studied/ You had better study/ It would be better to study). In the first part of the article there is a description of the syntax and semantics of this pan-Hispanic structure and some specialized pragmatic functions. Likewise, information is given on some units of a communicative type (taggers, phraseological units) in whose organizational structure includes some form of the verb valer, especially in the third person singular of the present indicative tense. In the second part of the study, three forms, two modal indicators and a connector, are reported, which have been classified as más vale. In a previous article it was explained that the use of más vale (que + indicativo [that + indicative]) in current Spanish has a geographic variation that is limited to Navarre (Spain) and, apparently, to Argentina as well. However, the meaning that más vale has in each of these geographical areas is different. In the first case it works as a categorical locution that shares the semantic features of the pattern menos mal (less bad). Meanwhile, the other categorical locution, on which this study will focus its attention, is an epistemic categorical adverb that would be integrated in the paradigm of statement reinforcers, among which we find por supuesto, claro, desde luego, evidentemente, etc (of course/ sure/ certainly/ obviously). Based on these facts, in the current study the following objectives are pursued: a) based on the information of several corpus, especially the macro corpus Spanish Web 2018 (esTenTen18), it is intended to offer an approach to the local distribution of the epistemic categorical adverb más vale; b) secondly, bearing in mind descriptions of other statement reinforcers in Spanish, the macro syntax and the communicative performance of this disjunctive conjunctions will be discussed; c) finally, after mentioning the presence of más vale as a rephrasing connector, some reflections on the use of the three más vale mentioned in the article are sketched, following the trail of studies that have shown the semantic shift from comparison to modality and rephrasing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]