Interfaz prosodia-pragmática: Usos de pero y estrategias de mitigación en un corpus de habla espontánea

Abstract

The aim of this article is to characterize the prosodic patterns associated with different semantic-pragmatic values of utterances containing the conjunction pero ‘but’ in a spontaneous oral corpus of Rioplatense Spanish. In previous investigations, two values associated with the use of the conjunction pero were distinguished: either adversative or pre-concessive (Ferrari et al. 2021, Güemes et al .2021). Our hypothesis is that, unlike the adversative uses, the pre-concessive pero constitutes a face salving mitigation device to avoid contrast, in order to counterargue. Forty utterances were analyzed based on several acoustic parameters: occurrence and duration of pauses, duration of the conjunction, speed and inflection of the first constituent. In addition, the accentual patterns of the pre-concessive utterances were identified through the Sp-ToBI labeling system. The results show that the pre-concessive constructions present certain acoustic and accentual characteristics in correlation with their pragmatic values. This type of utterances, by presenting continuative inflections, encode a meaning of incompleteness that constitutes a mitigation strategy used to avoid the pragmatic consequences of counterargumentation.