Cover not available

In:Discourse Segmentation in Romance Languages
Edited by Salvador Pons Bordería
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 250] 2014
► pp. 157–183

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

On the delimitation of discursive units in colloquial Spanish

Val.Es.Co application model

 | Val.Es.Co Research Group, University of Valencia
Published online: 14 November 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.250.06cab
This paper outlines the theoretical framework of the Val.Es.Co Research Group, dealing with the description and delimitation of discourse units; more concretely, minor discourse units will be dealt with. To set the limits of discourse units, this system combines both prosodic and semantic/pragmatic features, being their combination not hierarchical but complementary. In other words, either prosodic, semantic or pragmatic features can become determining when identifying conversational units in specific contexts. Finally, two cases of colloquial Spanish are analysed in which delimiting discourse units becomes a problematic task, namely the Spanish discourse marker bueno (‘well’) and suspended utterances. In the first case, prosody is not as relevant as semantics, whereas in the second one the contrary holds. In both cases, the Val.Es.Co system provides a solution to help delimit this units.
References (37)
References
Briz, Antonio. 1998. El Español Coloquial en la Conversación: Esbozo de Pragmagramática. Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Briz, AntonioValesco Research Group. , and 2003. “Un sistema de unidades para el estudio del lenguaje coloquial.” Oralia 6: 7–61.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Briz, Antonio, and Salvador Pons. 2010. “Unidades, marcadores discursivos y posición.” In Los Estudios sobre Marcadores del Discurso en Español, Hoy, ed. by Óscar Loureda, and Esperanza Acín, 327–358. Madrid: Arco/Libros.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cabedo, Adrián. 2009. La Segmentación Prosódica en Español Coloquial. Valencia: Quaderns de Filologia.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Capone, Alessandro. 2006. “Speech Acts: Classification and Definition.” In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (2nd ed.), ed. by Keith Brown, 681–684. Oxford: Elsevier. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H., and Edward F. Schaefer. 1987. “Collaborating on Contributions to Conversations.” Language and Cognitive Processes 2 (1): 19–41. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1989. “Contributing to Discourse.” Cognitive Science 13 (2): 259–294. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cortés, Luis. 1991. Sobre Conectores, Expletivos y Muletillas en el Español Hablado. Málaga: Editorial Librería Ágora.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2002. “Las unidades del discurso oral.” Boletín de Lingüística 17: 7–29.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cortés, Luis, and Matilde Camacho. 2005. Unidades de Segmentación y Marcadores del Discurso: Elementos Esenciales en el Procesamiento Discursivo Oral. Madrid: Arco Libros.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cresti, Emmanuella. 2003. “Illocution et modalité dans le comment et le topic.” In Macrosyntaxe et Pragmatique: L’Analyse Linguistique del’Oral. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Degand, Liesbeth, and Anne Catherine Simon. 2005. “Minimal Discourse Units: Can We Define Them, and Why Should We.” Proceedings of SEM-05. Connectors, Discourse Framing and Discourse Structure: From Corpus-based and Experimental Analyses to Discourse Theories , 65–74.
Degand Liesbeth, and Anne Catherine Simon. 2009. “On Identifying Basic Discourse Units in Speech: Theoretical and Empirical Issues.” Discours. Revue De Linguistique, Psycholinguistique Et Informatique 4. Available online at [URL]Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Estellés, Maria, and, Adrián Cabedo. In press. “On the Role of Prosody in Disambiguating the Meaning of Discourse Markers. Bueno in Peninsular Spanish.”
Field, Andy. 2009. Discovering Statistics Using SPSS (3rd ed.). Sage Publications Ltd.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ignacio Pereira, Daniel. 2011. “Análisis acústico de los marcadores discursivos a ver, bueno, claro, vale, ¿cómo? y ya.” Onomázein 24 (2): 85–100.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jurafsky, Daniel, Elizabeth Shriberg, Barbara Fox, and Traci Curl. 1998. “Lexical, Prosodic, and Syntactic Cues for Dialog Acts.” In Proceedings of ACL/COLING-98 Workshop on Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers , 114–120.
Martín, Pedro. 2006. “Prosodia del marcador bueno.” Anuario De Letras 44: 17–76.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Martín-Zorraquino, María A. 1994. “‘Bueno’ como operador pragmático.” Español Actual 403–412.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Martín-Zorraquino, María A. and Portolés, José 1999. “Los marcadores del discurso.” In Gramática Descriptiva de la Lengua Española, ed. by Ignacio Bosque, and Violeta Demonte, 4051–4214. Madrid: Espasa.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mushin, Ilana, Lesley Stirling, Janet Fletcher, and Roger Wales. 2003. “Discourse Structure, Grounding and Prosody in Task-oriented Dialogue.” Discourse Processes 35 (1): 1–31. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pons Bordería, Salvador. 1998. Conexión y Conectores. Valencia: Quaderns de Filologia.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2003. “From Agreement to Stressing and Hedging: Spanish Bueno and Claro.” In Partikeln Und Höfflichkeit, ed. by Gudrun Held, 219–236. Berna: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. “La combinación de marcadores del discurso en la conversación coloquial: Interacciones entre posición y función.” Estudos Linguísticos/Linguistic Studies (Ediçoes Colibri) 2: 141–159.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011. “Bueno 1, 2 y 3.” In Diccionario de Partículas Discursivas, ed. by Antonio Briz, Salvador Pons, and José Portolés. [URL].Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Quilis, Antonio, Margarita Cantarero, and Manuel Esgueva. 1993. “El grupo fónico y el grupo de entonación en español hablado.” Revista De Filología Española LXXIII: 55–65. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fuentes, Catalina. 1993. “Comportamiento discursivo de bueno, bien, pues bien.” Estudios De Lingüística 9: 205–222.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Roulet, Eddy. 1984. “Speech Acts, Discourse Structure and Pragmatic Connectives.” Journal of Pragmatics 8 (1): 31–47. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sbisà, Marina. 2002. “Speech Acts in Context.” Language & Communication 22 (4): 421–436. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A., and Harvey Sacks. 1973 “Opening up Closings.” Semiotica 8 (4): 289–327. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Amanda. 2005. Modelling Speech Acts in Conversational Discourse. Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shriberg, Elizabeth, Rebecca Bates, Andreas Stolcke, Paul Taylor, Daniel Jurafsky, Klaus Ries, Noah Coccaro, Rachel Martin, Marie Meteer, and Carol van Ess-Dykema. 1998. “Can prosody aid the automatic classification of dialog acts in conversational speech?” Language and Speech 41 (3): 443–92.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, Peter W.H. 1991. Speech Act Theory, Discourse Structure and Indirect Speech. Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stadler, Stefanie A. 2011. “Coding Speech Acts for their Degree of Explicitness.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (1): 36–50. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Travis, Catherine E. 2005. Discourse Markers in Colombian Spanish: A Study in Polysemy. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van Dijk, Teun. 1985. “Introduction: Dialogue as Discourse and Interaction.” In Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Vol. 3, ed. by Teun Van Dijk, 1–11. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Majhenič, Simona, Mitja Beras & Janez Križaj
2025. The Neglected Group: Cognitive Discourse Markers as Signposts of Prosodic Unit Boundaries. Languages 10:7 ► pp. 159 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue