Evidentials, politeness and prosody in Spanish: A corpus analysis

Abstract

This paper analyzes three Spanish particles, namely al parecer, por lo visto and según parece, whose status as pure evidentials (i.e., elements that only convey "source of information") has been put into question. The aim of this study is twofold: firstly, to observe the incidence of prosody in triggering the contextual meanings usually expressed by evidentials, i.e., politeness, impoliteness and self-image activities; secondly, to find out whether their prosodic behaviour provides any hint of their core meaning being "source of information". In order to carry out this analysis, a corpus of circa three million words of Peninsular Spanish has been compiled, which aims to reflect a variety of registers (formal and informal) and genres (both confrontational and nonconfrontational). The study reveals different prosodic behaviours exhibited by pure evidentials on the one hand, and contextual meanings on the other. Theoretically speaking, the concept of "relational work" embraces all the contextual meanings, and therefore explains the prosodic difference more effectively than other concepts. On the other hand, data show a high number of cases in Spanish where evidentials are used with their pure meaning, thus supporting the existence of elements exclusively conveying "source of information", without any further contextual nuance.

Evidentiality and humor in Spanish

“…This evaluative nature becomes visible as a contextual meaning in some of the contexts examined. Although it is true that Spanish has coded some of its evidentials to express the source of information, as happens with al parecer ('apparently') or por lo visto ('apparently') ( Ruiz-Gurillo, 2004González Ramos, 2005;Cornillie, 2007;RAE, 2010;Martín Zorraquino, 2010;Kotwika, 2013;Estellés & Albelda, 2014), those analyzed here are characterized by lower degrees of grammaticalization. Según dicen, dicen que and se ve que identify the source information in the same way, though.…”

On the interactional dimension of evidentials: The case of the Spanish evidential discourse markers

“…The evidential marker accompanies a SoA that threatens the face of the speaker (cf. ‘self-image’ or ‘relational work’ in Estellés Arguedas and Albelda Marco, 2014: 8);…”

“…2 Furthermore, Martín Zorraquino and Portolés (1999: 63.6) observe a pragmatic dimension of irony and avoidance of taking responsibility, and González Ramos (2005) mentions an additional effect of questioning the content of the utterance. Furthermore, Estellés Arguedas and Albelda Marco (2014) detect specific prosodic patterns for the purely evidential and pragmatically enriched uses of por lo visto and al parecer . In this article, we will underpin the irony and lack of responsibility reading by looking at the turn and the sequence the marker appears in.…”

The Boundaries Between Perception and Evidentiality. Dialectal and Diachronic Variation in Se Ve Que

“…Therefore, an element that introduces a conclusion but does not provide the bases that sustain it, could be considered as introducing a weak conclusion, with low commitment from the speaker and, therefore, it is inclined to develop mitigation. In fact, the literature that relates the evidence with the mitigating value is vast (including, among others, García Negroni 2002;Ruiz Gurillo 2005;Fuentes 2009;Martín Zorraquino 2010;Kotwica 2013;Estellés & Albelda 2014;Alonso-Almeida 2015;Albelda 2016aAlbelda , 2016bGonzález Ramos 2016;Marcos 2016;González Condom 2018;Figueras 2019).…”