Acoustic analysis of discourse markers a ver, bueno, claro, vale, ¿cómo? and ya

Abstract

This paper aims to show the results of phonetic-pragmatic analysis applied to the discourse markers a ver, bueno, claro, vale, ¿cómo? and ya in semi-spontaneous speech. The objective is to determine the incidence of acoustic-phonetic patterns upon the perception of the pragmatic meaning of ‘anger’, ‘assent’ and ‘strangeness’. To achieve this, a procedure to obtain data was designed. This data was then examined according to the acoustic phase of the protocol of melodic speech analysis, proposed by Cantero and Font (2009). It is, therefore, an exploratory study about experimental phonetic based on pragmatics. The main results highlight the facts that a) there is a phonetic pattern for the analyzed discourse markers, at least in the Chilean variety of the Spanish language, formed tonetically by /- interrogative, - suspended, + emphatic/; and b) the variation in the suprasegmental phonetics configuration of the discursive units studied is related to the variation of the pragmatic meaning.