Marcadores pragmáticos en el español culto de Santiago de Chile: aspectos prosódicos

Abstract

This article analyses the prosodic behaviour of those pragmatic markers that support discourse and which are to be found in the educated speech of Chilean Spanish speakers. The description is based upon the auditory and acoustic analysis of samples of spontaneous and semispontaneous speech taken from a corpus of Spanish gathered as part of the FONDECYT Project 197/1053 being currently carried out at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. We postulate the hypothesis that the prosodic behaviour of discoursal pragmatic markers is determined by discourse-semantic factors ascribable to some systemic characteristics of the speech variety under study.