BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    Regional pragmatic variation in the use of the discourse marker pues in informal talk among university students in Quito (Ecuador), Santiago (Chile) and Seville (Spain)

    Fuentes Rodríguez, C. and Placencia, Maria Elena and Palma-Fahey, M. (2016) Regional pragmatic variation in the use of the discourse marker pues in informal talk among university students in Quito (Ecuador), Santiago (Chile) and Seville (Spain). Journal of Pragmatics 97 , pp. 74-92. ISSN 0378-2166.

    [img]
    Preview
    Text
    14774.pdf - Author's Accepted Manuscript

    Download (694kB) | Preview

    Abstract

    The discourse marker pues in spoken Spanish has been studied extensively in Peninsular Spanish (cf. Fuentes Rodríguez 1987; Portolés 1989; Garcés Gómez 1992). There is also a growing body of studies on pues in Latin American varieties of Spanish (cf. Zavala 2001; Travis 2005; Vázquez Carranza 2013). Less attention, however, has been given to this discourse marker in Chilean and Ecuadorian Spanish (cf. Poblete 1998; Olbertz 2013). Taking a variational pragmatics perspective (Schneider and Barron 2008; Placencia 2011; Schneider and Placencia forthcoming), this paper examines the impact of region in the use of pues among university students in Quito (Ecuador), Santiago (Chile) and Seville (Spain). It is based on a corpus of 60 role-play interactions within each location eliciting advice-giving and complaint talk in –SD (social distance) –P (power) scenarios. The paper looks at variation in relation to form, position and distribution relating to turns and sections of the conversations. It also looks at the function of pues across data sets, noting its use as both a connector and an operator (Fuentes Rodríguez 2003, 2009), and thus highlighting the close interconnection between position and discursive function. Some shared features as well as features of variation were observed. Concerning function, for example, pues was found to occur as both a connector and an operator across varieties; however, we found a clear preponderance of pues as an operator in Quito and Santiago, and of pues as a connector in Seville.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): discourse markers, variational pragmatics, pues, regional variation, Chilean Spanish, Ecuadorian Spanish, Peninsular Spanish
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Depositing User: Maria Elena Placencia
    Date Deposited: 12 May 2016 14:22
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:37
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/14774

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    844Downloads
    6 month trend
    245Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item Edit/View Item