Distancing reformulators in the speech of Santiago, Chile: igual and its functional equivalents

Abstract

The aim of this study is to complete the sociolinguistic analysis of the use of reformulators of detachment in the Spanish spoken in Santiago, Chile, that we report in San Martín (2004-2005 and 2013). To this end, the amount of material analyzed was expanded and inferential statistical tests were applied. Thus, the behavior of these discourse markers in a stratified sample of 120 interviews of Santiago's informants is described, and we establish their socio-linguistic distribution, calculating the significancy of the contrast of their mean and their mean rank. Also, the theoretical conceptualization of discourse markers of Cortés (1998), Martin Zorraquino & Portolés (1999), Portolés (2001) and Carbonero & Santana (2010) was developed. The markers that fulfilled the role of “reformulation of detachment” in the corpus were: igual, en todo caso and de todas maneras, whose employment frequencies were correlated with the factors: sex, age and socioeconomic group of informants, based on their functional commutability at the discursive level. The results show that igual is the most frequent reformulator of detachment and that it is more used by young speakers of the community under study.