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This paper reports the results of a contrastive analysis of the instances of attenuation occurring in a set of Argentine and Spanish colloquial conversations. Attenuation -understood as a pragmatic phenomenon reducing the illocutionary force of communicative acts, which involves face and the speakers' responsibilities for their messages (Caffi 1999, 2007; Thaler; Albelda 2016)- has been studied to a significant extent in the Spanish language, beginning in the 1990s, from the perspective of politeness studies (Haverkate; Briz 1995, 2007), pragmatics (Schneider) and sociolinguistics (Samper Hernández; Cestero). However, studies concentrating on the comparison between its diatopic varieties are scarce (Briz 2007; Albelda 2008). This study quantitatively and qualitatively analyses the attenuation resources utilized in colloquial conversations between speakers aged 20-34 at the higher and middle social strata in the cities of Tucumán (Argentina) and Valencia (Spain). The analysis was based on a methodological data sheet (Albelda/ others) with the aim of finding the main similarities and differences between both diatopic varieties. [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 present paper attempts to establish the evidential character of the special prosodic configuration associated with direct reported discourse (DRD). A variety of expressive meanings have been commonly attributed to this marked prosodic configuration of DRD (such as expression of stance, emotion, mimicking, alignment). However, the concurrence of pragmatic/expressive meanings together with evidentiality is very frequent in ‘non-evidential’ languages like Spanish. Therefore, we argue that the prosody in DRD also signals ‘reported’ or ‘quoted’ discourse and, therefore, the presence of evidentiality. To provide evidence for this latter claim, 449 instances of DRD have been extracted from a corpus of (Iberian) Spanish colloquial conversations containing c. 150,000 words, and their prosodic behaviour has been observed. The data reveals a marked prosody in the majority of DRD instances in our corpus. Especial attention has been paid to the examples of DRD with no explicit introductory marks (e.g. verba dicendi ), since 100% of them are prosodically marked. Here, the marked prosody is the only indicator of the source of information. Consequently, it stops being a redundant trait (concomitant to the presence of introductory verbs or marks): it becomes prominent and its use is not optional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our paper we tackle the topic of the knowledge of Mexican Spanish vocabulary through several types of dictionaries registering it. We make an historical overview recalling the impact of Spanish on the autochthonous people, as well as some remarks on the influence of the Castillian norm, as the leading norm, on Mexican Spanish. We also offer points of analysis for the knowledge of the privative and we analyze the theoretical tendencies of actual lexicography in registering Mexican Spanish. [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]

Traditional analytic approaches establish a strong connection between discourse markers (DMs) and a number of prosodic cues regularly associated to them (especially pauses and strong variations in pitch), mainly on the sole basis of DMs being prescriptively written with a comma or (semi)colon placed after them. Within theories based on discourse units, minimal discourse units tend to be identified on the basis of prosodic criteria and, therefore, DMs are considered independent, minimal discourse units. This paper, however, puts this tight relationship into question by presenting a prosodic and discursive analysis of eleven discourse markers extracted from a Spanish spontaneous corpus (Val. Es.Co 2.0 Corpus, online version). Data show two main conclusions: first, that a discourse marker is, indeed, a minimal discourse unit; secondly, however, that the relationship between discourse markers and prosodic cues is neither as frequent nor as straightforward as it had been expected initially; therefore, a reconsideration of the criteria used to delimit minor discourse units needs to be done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to advance in the study of the formal features of the radio comments, a genre that appeared in Spanish talk radio programming in the late 90s and that has now become a key piece in any news, sports or entertainment program. From a more particular perspective, we are interested in analyzing the colloquial register as a stylistic constant that can be found in many comments, despite being highly planned texts, to humanize the texts, making them closer and more familiar to the audience. [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 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]

This paper describes the different uses that the verb "cachar" has acquired in Chilean colloquial Spanish, and tries to explain these uses within the framework of the linguistic notions of polysemy, language functions, and speech registers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]