Search results for "Pragmatic function"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
Co-occurrence of discourse markers in English : from juxtaposition to composition
2019
Abstract In this paper, we report on a qualitative analysis of co-occurring discourse markers, that is, sequences of adjacent discourse markers that belong to the same unit but may express different functions. We examine several formal and functional features of these co-occurring strings on the basis of corpus examples extracted from conversational data in English. In particular, we focus on scope, meaning-in-context (or functions), syntactic category and position. Our analysis reveals several degrees of integration: differences in scope allow us to differentiate juxtaposition and combination of markers. In the case of combination, difference in meaning integration allows us to distinguish…
About the Use of Tag Questions in Andean Spanish
2021
This paper aims to describe the use of tag questions in the variety of Andean Spanish spoken in Bolivia. In particular, it explores the tag questions that occur in the Corpus oral del español hablado por bilingües de aymara-español. The analysis consists of two levels. On the one hand, it describes the pragmatic functions of tag questions and identifies the correlation between their distribution and their pragmatic functions. On the other hand, it focuses on the impact that social factors (the speakers’ sex, age, and education) have on the frequency of the tags. Along these lines, it displays the lack of a general sociolinguistic trend in the use of tag questions, furthermore, it shows that…
‘La verdad (es que)’: Significado nuclear y atenuante
2017
The aims of this research are to define the attenuating function in the uses of la verdad (es que) and to evaluate the counter expectation value in the awakening of this pragmatic function. La verdad (es que) has been generally defined as a reinforcement discourse marker (Portoles, 1998; Fuentes 2009, 2012), even if some recent studies have shown that it is mostly used as an attenuating device (Gonzalez & Maldonado, 2007; Soler, 2015a). Based on this assumption, the research analyses the attenuating uses of this construction in a corpus of synchronic oral and written texts in peninsular Spanish, which cover different genres and registers, in order to explain which discourse circumstances ca…