On the prosodic realization of Spanish ¿no?-tags from a pragmatic perspective

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to report on an empirical study investigating the prosodic realization of the Spanish tag ¿no? added to host clauses with different clause types, realizing various speech act types. Although ¿no? is commonly assumed to display a rising contour, we show that there are level and falling contours over the tag as well, even though rising contours are indeed dominant. The observed tendencies confirm the hypotheses that the contour over the tag is influenced both by the clause type of the host clause (¿no? in exclamatives and interrogatives display wider tonal excursions, and is more often realized with a rising contour than imperatives and declaratives). On the other hand, the type of the modified speech act also plays a role: commissives show more rising contours than expressives, directives and assertives. On the pragmatic side, we assume (with Kiss (2018)) that the function of the tag is the attribution of the whole discourse move to the addressee. In addition, we suppose that the rising contour over the tag signals a call on the addressee to interpret the whole discourse move as a meta-question on the attribution of the realized speech act to the addressee.

On the Functional Convergence of Pragmatic Markers in Arizona Spanish

“…While tags themselves are considered a subset of PMs, the term tag question (TQ) is misleading, creating bias through inferring that all tags serve a response-seeking function. While that may be the case sometimes, where tags are used to elicit confirmation or information (Allerton 2009;Croft 2022;García Vizcaíno 2005;Gazdik 2022; Gómez González 2014), tags themselves do not always need or want an answer (Allerton 2009;Gómez González 2014;Kimps et al 2014aKimps et al , 2014bPichler 2013). Thus, we concur with Kimps et al (2014a) that, rather than TQs, we should refer to this PM subset simply as "tags".…”

“…While no may be considered as being the de facto PM for Arizona Spanish analyzed here, used by 94% of all participants, the other variants are not as widely spread, with saber being used by 50%, you know by 42%, and qué no by 14% of speakers. A specific breakdown by variant can be seen in Table 2 below: Reflecting the fact that use of discourse/pragmatic variables is considered as highly individualized behavior, we take these numbers as an indication that while no is already well-established as a PM in most varieties of Spanish (Carvalho and Kern 2019;Degand et al 2022;García Vizcaíno 2005;Gazdik 2022;Gómez González 2012; Uclés Ramada 2020), the DMs you know and saber are representative of only an intermediate degree of diffusion, as they are used by half of all speakers. As for qué no, due to its heretofore understudied status in Borderlands Spanish, further exploration of its usage in Arizona, New Mexico, and Sonora is required to establish how widespread its use is.…”

“…For the first group, that is, tags, no, as used in Spanish, is well-documented (Carvalho and Kern 2019;Degand et al 2022;García Vizcaíno 2005;Gazdik 2022;Gómez González 2012; Uclés Ramada 2020), usually analyzed as canonically invariant and seeking an interlocutor's response (Gómez González 2012. It is by far the most well-studied Spanish PM analyzed here, with negative-polarity tags being more common than positive ones (Degand et al 2022;Gómez González 2014), although a majority of past studies analyzed Peninsular rather than Latin American Spanish.…”

Acoustic Correlates of Subtypes of Irony in Chilean Spanish

“…We also expect lower F0 (Rao 2013;Cheang and Pell 2008;Attardo et al 2003) and differences in voice quality (Niebuhr 2014;Cheang and Pell 2008) in sarcastic utterances. Rhetorical questions are one of the subtypes of speech acts used by Gazdik (2022) in her examination of the use of the tag question ¿No? in Peninsular Spanish, and the author finds that nearly all occurrences of ¿No?…”