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The aim of this paper is to present the social and stylistic variation in the speech prosody of the Spanish of Mérida, Yucatán. Assertive utterances from sociolinguistic interviews and discourse completion tasks are analyzed considering the social variables of age, gender and educational level. The prosodic analysis is carried out within the Autosegmental Metrical model (Pierrehumbert 1980, Ladd 2008) and with the Sp_ToBI labeling conventions (Hualde & Prieto 2015). The results show that this variety of Spanish is characterized by a prominent descent starting from the first tonal peak, the early-peak alignment in some prenuclear positions, and the presence of some non-falling boundary tones. The social and stylistic variation suggests that the last two are features that indicate vernacularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses concessive resources with a mitigating function which are found in argumentative acts in the PRESEEA corpus from Santiago, Chile. Based on data from 36 semi-structured interviews, the behaviour of concessive-oppositional moves and concessive discourse particles in argumentative acts is analyzed, and their sociolinguistic variation is described in relation to the speakers' gender, age and level of education. The key findings highlight that in Chilean Spanish there are at least 12 strategies that fulfill a mitigating concessive function, among which "sí, pero (yes, but) + negation", "aunque (even though)", "no, pero (no, but) + assertion" and "a pesar (de) que (despite the fact that)" stand out. These strategies are linked to the functions of self-protection and face prevention in the development of the argumentative act. Furthermore, it is also observed that the variation is mostly due to the subject's age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]