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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 29:1 (2019) ► pp.83–106

Searches and clicks in Peninsular Spanish

| University of St. Thomas
| University of St. Thomas

The current study analyzes the use of click sounds in Peninsular Spanish with a focus on those that occur when speakers are searching for what to say and signaling a particular stance. The data corpus consists of interviews with 18 speakers from Spain who produce a total of 281 clicks. We consider clicks to be a non-lexical discourse marker that conveys information to the listener regarding how an utterance should be interpreted. By applying a discourse-pragmatic approach from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives, we examine contextual and co-textual factors that co-occur with the click and contribute to a multimodal display consisting of pauses, fillers, repetitions, prolongations, gestures and object of search. The quantitative results indicate some statistically significant differences with regard to how clicks interact with the linguistic and extralinguistic environments. Qualitatively, we show evidence supporting the idea that clicks are part of a larger multimodal communicative activity.

Keywords: clicks, discourse markers, fillers, gestures, searches
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants and data
    • 3.2Classification of clicks
    • 3.3Object of search, gestures and click environment
    • 3.4Research questions
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Quantitative results
    • 4.2Qualitative results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 7 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.18020.pin
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