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Perspectives on Evidentiality in Spanish: Explorations across genres
Edited by Carolina Figueras Bates and Adrián Cabedo
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 290] 2018
► pp. 125–146

Chapter 6
Prosody, genres and evidentiality in Spanish

The case of “por lo visto”

| University of Valencia. | Val.Es.Co Research Group

The aim of this paper is to present a prosodic analysis of the evidential discourse marker por lo visto (‘apparently’) in six oral discourse genres: everyday conversation, discussion, sociolinguistic interviews, TV talks, parliamentary interventions, and news. The multimedia material used for this study comes from real samples of spontaneous speech; among the sources used are linguistic corpora (Valesco, CORLEC) and TV websites, or the Spanish government’s official site. In the experimental design, 29 records were analysed statistically according to different variables, mainly phonic (TOBI accents, pitch, intensity, speech rate and so on). The results showed that (a) the tonal accent L + H * is predominant in news, political discourse and sociolectal interviews; (b) only the political discourse and sociolectal interview showed examples of por lo visto as an independent intonational phrase; and (c) prosody seemed to differentiate the pragmatic and the core meanings of the evidential por lo visto in genres in which both possibilities coexist (excluding genres in which the examples are only oriented towards the core evidential pole (news) or towards the pragmatic pole (political speech).

Keywords: prosody, genres, evidentiality, por lo visto , Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Selected genres and samples
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Multimedia material
    • 3.2Acoustic and auditory processing of the data
    • 3.3Phonic and descriptive variables
    • 3.4Frequencies and statistical analyses
  • 4.Genre analysis
    • 4.1Phonological study
      • 4.1.1Melodic patterns according the AMH model
      • 4.1.2Tonal accents
      • 4.1.3Break indices and boundary tones
    • 4.2Acoustic analysis
    • 4.3Core meaning versus pragmatic meaning
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 24 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.290.06cab
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Cited by 1 other publications

Cabedo Nebot, Adrián & Carolina Figueras Bates
2018. Chapter 1. Evidentiality in discourse. In Perspectives on Evidentiality in Spanish [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 290], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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