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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 29:4 (2019) ► pp.463–492

The permeability of tag questions in a language contact situation

The case of Spanish-Portuguese bilinguals

ORCID logo | University of Arizona
| The University of Virginia’s College at Wise

In this paper, we utilize negative polarity tag questions in order to assess to what extent discourse-pragmatic variables are susceptible to language contact induced changes. Based on a comparison of forms and functions of negative tags in the varieties spoken by Portuguese-Spanish bilinguals in a community on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border with the one spoken by monolinguals in the Uruguayan capital, we aimed at assessing to what extent any differences in this variable behavior may be affected by contact with Portuguese. Our results indicate that, despite the high permeability of discourse-pragmatic features in contact situations attested in the literature and the presumed tendency for cognate languages to converge, the forms and functions of negative tags in bilingual Spanish did not radically differ from the monolingual variety. We found, instead, an intricate pattern of convergences and divergences that challenges the presupposed assumptions about extreme permeability of cognate discourse pragmatic systems in contact.

Keywords: language contact, discourse markers, tag questions, bilingualism, Portuguese, Spanish, border
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The community
  • 3.Negative polarity tag questions as a discourse-pragmatic feature in Spanish and Portuguese
  • 4.Method
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Forms of negative polarity tag questions
    • 5.2Functions of negative polarity tag questions
      • 5.2.1The involvement inducer function
      • 5.2.2The epistemic marker function
      • 5.2.3The mitigation device
      • 5.2.4The attitudinal stance
      • 5.2.5The alignment signal
      • 5.2.6The discursive device
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 21 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.18068.car
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