Search

Cohesion in a text can occur through different linguistic devices. Some of these package the propositional content of whole previous stretches of text. In the absence of terminological unanimity, in this paper they will be analyzed under the label nominal encapsulation. The aim of this paper is thus to qualitatively examine the discursive shifts taking part in the translation of encapsulating mechanisms in parliamentary discourses having Spanish as target language and any other of the main European languages (namely English, French, German, Italian) as source language. For this purpose, a corpus-assisted analysis has been carried out. We have studied a parallel corpus containing the Proceedings of the European Parliament between the years 1996 and 2009, called Europarl5 (Koehn, 2005). The results obtained reveal that most of the shifts pertaining to encapsulating devices embody an explicitation process which tends to make the target text in Spanish more evaluative than the source text through discourse labels. This may be partially explained by the conventions that seem to underlie parliamentary discourses in Spanish and partially by the general tendency to explicitation in the translation process that has been traditionally hypothesized in Translation Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the pragmalinguistic analysis of those adverbs and expressions that qualify the formulation of the statement as sincere. Specifically, the main objective of this paper is to investigate those argumentative and social values that can be updated by these units in declarative sentences used in colloquial conversations and other interactions such as debates or interviews. From the argumentative standpoint, we found that all elements analyzed realizantes behave as modifiers: these units enhance the enunciation, reinforce the assumption of the above, and assume a preference declarative argumentiva increase strength in the utterance that are inserted. From the argumentative point of view, we have verified that all the analyzed elements behave as modifiers realizantes: these units heighten the statement, reinforce the assumption of the dictum, suppose an enunciative preference and increase the argumentative force of the utterance that are inserted. The variability is located in the social field, in which the basic discursive operation may cause different effects depending on the characteristics of the communicative situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyze the information about the paraverbal communication provided by Spanish manuals of forensic eloquence published in the 19th century. Specifically, the works analyzed are: Sainz de Andino (1847[1828]), Enciso Castrillón (1840), Corradi (1843), Saurí y Lleopart (1847), Pérez de Anaya (1848), López (2013[1849]) and León y Olarrieta (1862). In conclusion, the first published manual is the one that contains more information on paraverbal communication, followed by Enciso Castrillón (1840) and Corradi (1843). In the same way, it should be emphasized that in many of the works studied the pauses have a prominent role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Co-construction is basically a dialogical manifestation of conversational narratives, that becomes less productive when the communicative situations gain in formality and structuring. This paper analyzes the transition between conversational narrative and formal conversation to discover how co-constructions tends to disappear and get controlled in the formal communication. The study is based on an oral diaphasic corpus of Mexican Spanish, that allows to compare different levels of formality from oral conversations in different communicative situations, showing how the pragmatic conditions of the conversation operate in each level of formality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vamos con todo is a tabloid style news programme on Ecuadorian television with elements of a talk show. It uses controversy in the news and in the topics it presents as a means of attracting viewers. Through the presenters' subsequent comments, on the other hand, it attempts to minimize the controversy created, striving for a harmonious resolution of situations of conflict. Mitigation is the key strategy that presenters employ for this purpose. They resort to a range of lexical and syntactic mechanisms that function as hedges, thus minimizing the illocutionary force of their utterances. Appealing to emotion is another mechanism that they make use of to achieve a degree of closeness with their viewers. These are the mechanisms that we examine in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to reach a better understanding of the relationship between polite strategies and the phonic features displayed to express them. To do this, an oral corpus has been collected comprising interventions of academic committees (PhD and master theses). From this corpus, a set of fragments were analysed, namely countervailing positive fragments included in negative blocks and negative fragments embedded in positive blocks. The expected phonic behaviour is an increased phonic prominence in the former case and a decrease in the latter one. Despite this tendency being satisfied in most cases, however, a percentage of the examples do not follow this expected behaviour, where the tendency towards (lack of) phonic prominence is inverted. When comparing the phonic data with the degree of planning, it can be seen that abnormal results do frequently appear in interventions with a high degree of planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the function and the use of un poco and of its morphological alterations (un poquito, un poquitín, etc.) in different levels: in speech acts, in propositions, in speech, in social relationship established between speaker and hearer, and, finally, in context. Theoretical framework of the analysis is, primarily, modality, a notion applying to utterances and indicating the compromise level which the speaker maintains in respect of the utterance faithful. Secondly, I refer to mitigation within the most general theory of Politeness, in which this is a strategy to modulate speech act effects (Lakoff, 1972; Caffi, 1999, 2002, 2007). Here I examine the function of un poco from a semantic-pragmatic perspective also taking into account discourse's dimensión and the situations in which they occur. To study the phenomenon, I use real conversations' data proceeding by the Corpus de Conversaciones Coloquiales Val.Es.Co and by the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual CREA, to which I add some fragments proceeding by conversations that I recorded and transcribed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on attenuation has experienced a huge development in the last decades, particularly from some disciplines related to oral discourse, such as Pragmatics or Discourse Analysis. Nevertheless, its sociolinguistic variation has been hardly studied. This article aims to deep on the incidence that social parameters (age and sex) have on Spanish attenuating mechanisms and their discourse functions. The paper presents the quantitative results and findings obtained from 24 semi-controlled interviews taken from PRESEEA corpus, recorded both in Madrid and Valencia, amongst high sociocultural level speakers. This research is embedded in a specific project of PRESEEA Research Group (Proyecto para el Estudio Sociolingüístico del Español de España y América). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present in this paper a quantitative and qualitative analysis of conversational styles through an inter and intra-linguistic study of different kinds of requests in Spanish and Italian dialogues, aiming to examine cultural characteristics in some way expressed by stylistic choices of speakers of two so closely related languages. We explore a corpus of Spanish and Italian task-oriented dialogues, in which two participants have to collaborate and cooperate to reach a common goal. Looking at the interactional dynamics oriented to obtain information to solve the task, we can observe that Spanish speakers do perform a wide variety of requests, asking for communicative contribution using yes-no questions, wh-questions and both specific and general questions. They verify interlocutor's availability to cooperate and require his/her attention on specific topics, but also only at the interactional level. On the other hand, Italian speakers tend to adopt mostly communicative strategies based on checks and yes-no questions, facing up to the task from their point of view. Comparing them with Spanish speakers, they seem to be more affected by the kind of task, so that the effort to solve it results to be decisive in establishing interactional patterns. We can see the features of two different styles, both determined by the effort to solve the task and by a good level of cooperation and involvement, even if each of them characterised by different modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In GRIALE research group we have developed a theoretical method to explain the ironic statements in different genres (Principle of Inversion). In this paper we focus on the application of this method in ironic statements that occur in conversation, so that irony and humor coexist in a conversational exchange. Therefore, we studied not prototypical irony and humour with examples of spanish real conversations (COVJA, Corpus colloquial conversations and CREA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the preliminary results of a study focused on the definition of an inventory, of tonal patterns in Spanish dialogue speech using the GLISSANDO corpus, a corpus aimed for prosodic studies composed by a wide sample of formal and informal dialogues recorded by several speakers. The patterns described have been obtained automatically by applying the F0 contours stylisation, annotation and modeling procedure described in Garrido (2010) to a small sample of the corpus, four interactions (three formal and one informal) between two professional radio speakers, male and female (22 minutes and 53 seconds total duration). Results suggest that tonal patterns used in Spanish dialogues are, in general, the same as the ones used in reading style, although their uses and functions are probably slightly different as it was pointed out in previous studies. In any case, an in-depth analysis of the material collected in GLISSANDO will provide more details to confirm these initial conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the use of expressions of exemplification in the Spanish spoken in Caracas. The purpose of this study is to determine what aspects motivate the non-canonical use of por lo menos in place of por ejemplo. For the analysis of this particular use, I have used 24 interviews of Corpus Sociolinguistic of Caracas (1987). The parameters selected are of two types: i) linguistic -values of the expressions of exemplification and of por lo menos ('al menos','como minimo'), evidentiality, and topic proposed in the preceding sentence and in the sequence introduced by expressions of exemplification and by por lo menos-, and ii) social The results show that the use of expressions of exemplification is determined by social factors. Likewise, the use of por lo menos as an expression of exemplification has been motivated by certain semantic-pragmatic and discourse features shared by por lo menos ('al menos', 'como mínimo') and por ejemplo: generalization-particularization relationship, first-hand information and maintenance of the topic addressed in a previous generalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Propositional information is only part of the meaning conveyed in oral narratives. While explaining a specific situation, speakers structure their discourse and often include subjective connotations by using some discourse markers. In this paper, we compare three types of Spanish oral narratives showing differences both in their degree of spontaneity and emotionality. The narratives were, in the first place, segmented; next, discourse markers were identified and, finally, classified according to their main function (propositional, structural or modal). The main aim of this study is to show to what extent the frequency, type and function of discourse markers vary in relation to the degree of spontaneity and emotionality of oral narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the linguistic and sociolinguistic distribution of future forms (morphological -FM- or periphrastic variants -FP-) in 1519 examples from 36 speakers, a fraction in the materials included in the Sociolinguistic corpus of Mexico City. Main results are three: 1) even though FM is still alive in Mexico City, its use is residual in several ways; 2) more significant variables are referred to the sort of variation between forms, temporal distance, epistemic character, presence of a negative domain, school years and age, among others; 3) the process -a change from below- is in its last steps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on two of the major problems that have traditionally hindered the study of the so-called 'colloquial Spanish', namely (i) terminological hesitation and lack of consensus in referring to this linguistic form (designated indistinctly by terms such as 'language', 'speech', 'discourse', etc., on one side, and 'colloquial', 'spoken', 'conversational', etc., on the other side) and (ii) the lack of a clear and unitary definition of the object of study. For this purpose, first the most common designations and the conditions which make it possible to use them as synonymous are identified. Secondly, the conceptual structure of the most famous definitions and the linguistic and extralinguistic features of the object of study which each one of them emphasizes are analyzed. Finally, reasons for the perpetuation of the terminological and conceptual vagueness in the history of Spanish Linguistics are mentioned and a theoretical frame for a better definition of spoken or colloquial Spanish is suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]