@article{Garcia Chavez_2022, title={The use of ’ocupar’ as a verb of necessity in Mexican Spanish}, volume={11}, url={https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/borealis/article/view/6627}, DOI={10.7557/1.11.3.6627}, abstractNote={<p>In Mexican Spanish, <em>ocupar </em>(‘to occupy’) is often employed as a verb of need and necessity, with a similar use and denotation to those of <em>necesitar </em>(‘to need’). Despite it being widespread, very little has been written about this phenomenon. In this article, I provide a description of this novel meaning. This description is supported by a Twitter-based study on the distribution of the meanings of <em>ocupar </em>around three Mexican cities. The quantitative analysis of the data confirms the extensive use of <em>ocupar </em>as <em>necesitar</em>, although to varying extents; concretely, it was found to be most frequent in Monterrey. In qualitative terms, I demonstrate that <em>ocupar </em>as <em>necesitar </em>is more often used to express need (i.e., with a nominal complement) than modal necessity (i.e., as a semiauxiliary with a sentential complement). Lastly, I propose that the emergence of this meaning represents a case of ongoing grammaticalization, whose origin can be traced back to older meanings via semantic reanalysis</p>}, number={3}, journal={Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics}, author={Garcia Chavez, Erick}, year={2022}, month={Dec.}, pages={247–263} }