The pragmatic meaning of the Spanish construction lo que pasa es que

Lo que pasa es que can be found in Spanish with its original pseudo-cleft value (‘what happens is that’), but it is also very frequently found as a grammaticalized construction whose meaning is now procedural. This article offers a description of the pragmatic meaning and the uses of the grammaticalized construction lo que pasa es que in Spanish, which encodes both a contrastive and a causal meaning. Lo que pasa es que introduces a discourse segment that serves as counterargument for a statement previously stated or implicated in the discourse. Unlike other contrastive particles in Spanish (e.g., pero ‘but’), it cannot directly introduce the discourse segment that opposes the previous utterance, but only an argument that implicates the contrast. Moreover, lo que pasa es que carries a causative value, and the discourse segment that it introduces must be interpreted as a justification or an explanation for the implied contrastive conclusion. This analysis provides evidence for the connection between contrastive and causal relations and the crucial role that considering multiple viewpoints in discourse has in describing this connection.