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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]

Grammar studies have focused lately on speech instead of on written language, being the latter the most traditional approach. This situation confronts us with the necessity of a new definition for some grammar concepts. This paper proposes a new definition for the concept of sentence so that it can be used for spoken Spanish analysis. Already existing definitions are evaluated and discarded because they do not fit with many normal speech structures. Besides, they usually are confusing regarding syntactic, prosodic and pragmatic features. We propose a new definition only based on grammar and semantic features. Conclusions show that this approach allows the syntactic analysis of speech in a much more accurate way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we will examine three aspects of communicative immediacy in eighteenth century documents from the Diachronic Corpus of Spanish in the Kingdom of Granada (CORDEREGRA): the use of -ico, -illo and -ito, the variation diferiencia/diferencia, osted/usted and defunto/difunto, and the loss of /d/. We want to emphasise three methodological aspects in the study of orality: the importance of a control corpus, the problems that CORDE has for the historical study of colloquial Spanish and the value of the current sociolinguistic data to interpret the history of a language. [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]

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 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]