Ways of encoding attention to the interlocutor in contemporary spoken Spanish

The papers in this volume examine how Spanish speakers express attention to their interlocutors (or co-participants) verbally. It is now generally accepted that subjective expressions have interactional functions, encouraging the flow of discussion and creating cohesive discourse and that there are several ways of dealing with the intersubjective or dialogic nature of language: (i) studying heteroglossia or dialoguing voices in monologic texts, (ii) focusing on how in talk-in-interaction speakers refer to information held by the co-participant, (iii) examining intersubjective markers that encode the speaker’s assumptions about the co-participant. Concepts such as politeness, argumentation structure, attenuation and hedging are being used to account for the interactional dynamics examined. Moreover, several papers analyze the difference between spoken and written registers and some offer new evidence for functional paths of linguistic change. In doing so, they enrich previous accounts of modality, discourse markers, person referencing, spatial deixis and connectives in Spanish and beyond.