Prosody, genres and evidentiality in Spanish

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present a prosodic analysis of the evidential discourse marker por lo visto (‘apparently’) in six oral discourse genres: everyday conversation, discussion, sociolinguistic interviews, TV talks, parliamentary interventions, and news. The multimedia material used for this study comes from real samples of spontaneous speech; among the sources used are linguistic corpora (Valesco, CORLEC) and TV websites, or the Spanish government’s official site. In the experimental design, 29 records were analysed statistically according to different variables, mainly phonic (TOBI accents, pitch, intensity, speech rate and so on). The results showed that (a) the tonal accent L + H * is predominant in news, political discourse and sociolectal interviews; (b) only the political discourse and sociolectal interview showed examples of por lo visto as an independent intonational phrase; and (c) prosody seemed to differentiate the pragmatic and the core meanings of the evidential por lo visto in genres in which both possibilities coexist (excluding genres in which the examples are only oriented towards the core evidential pole (news) or towards the pragmatic pole (political speech).