An Interactional Approach to Evidential Discourse Markers in Spanish

An interactional approach to evidential discourse markers in Spanish

Pedro Gras (Universitat de Barcelona & University of Leuven)

Bert Cornillie (University of Leuven)

Topic, aims and methodology. It is established knowledge that Spanish does not grammatically encode the source of information of propositions. As a consequence, Spanish and other European languages have been classified as languages without evidentiality (Aikhenvald 2004). Yet, there is more than grammatical morphemes when it comes to describing evidentiality. Spanish has a series of lexical markers that refer to sensory perception and exclusively convey an evidential reading, e.g. por lo visto‘visibly, seemingly’, al parecer ‘seemingly’ and se ve(que) ‘apparently’ (Martín ZorraquinoPortolés, 1999; Fernández Sanmartín, 2006). In this paper we will show that these evidential markers have a discourse-grammatical function: they modalize the turn and shape the interactional sequence.

The aim of this paper is twofold: (i) to get to grips with the internal organization of the paradigm of evidential discourse markers in Spanish, (ii) to uncover interactional patterns that can account for the distribution of the members of the paradigm. From a semantic point of view, we examine the evidential values that can be expressed by these markers (i.e. direct evidence, reportative, inference) and discuss the correlations between them (see also Cornillie 2009). From a functional point of view, we will analyse the evidential markers on the basis of discourse-interactional criteria such as illocutionary force, position in the turn and kind of intervention. From a grammatical point of view, we will address the constraints on person and TAM that these evidential markers face in discourse (see also Traugott, 2007).

Data. The analysis is based on two corpus of spoken data: the Val.Es.Co. corpus (BrizVal.Es.Co., 2002); and the Corec corpus (Marcos Marín).

Preliminary results. Despitethefactthattheevidentialmarkersunderexaminationbearsomereferencetosensoryperception (theverbsver‘see’ andparecer ‘appear’), they do notservetoexpressdirectevidence. Bycontrast, they are used in utterancesthat are basedonindirectevidence, i.e. reportedknowledge and inferences. Moreover, thethreemarkersanalysed in thispaperexpressbothevidentialvalues in talk in interaction.Interestingly, turn-initial position seemsto be favoredbymarkersexpressinginferentialreadings, whereasturn-final position seemstoconvey more repotativereadings. Hence, althoughSpanishonlyencodesthedifferencebetweendirect and indirectevidence, a discourse-interactionalaccountallowsustopresent a more fine-grainedview of the actual usage of theindirectevidentialmarkers.

references

Aikhenvald, A. (2004): Evidentiality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Briz, A. & Val.Es.Co. (2002): Corpus de conversacionales coloquiales, Madrid, Arco/Libros.

Cornillie, B. (2009): “Evidentiality and epistemic modality: on the close relationship of two different categories”. Functions of Language. 16 (1): 44-32.

Fernández Sanmartín, A. (2006): La expresión de la modalidad epistémica en español conversacional, memoria de investigación inédita, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela.

Ford, C. E.; Fox, B. A.; & Thompson, S. A. (eds.) (2002): The language of turn and sequence, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Martín Zorraquino, M. A. & Portolés, J (1999), “Los marcadores del discurso”, chapter 63 in Bosque, I. & Demonte, V. (dirs.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, vol. III, pp. 4051-4214.

Traugott, E. C. (2007): “Discussion article: Discourse markers, modal particles, and contrastive analysis, synchronic and diachronic”, Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 6, pp. 139-157.