Phonic mitigation markers for disagreement in interviews of university learners of Spanish as foreign language

Abstract

In previous studies of the mitigators that occur when a speaker wants to show disagreement with his or her interlocutor, morphosyntactic markers occupy the most relevant part. In oral communication, however, phonic markers play a central role. This research presents the analysis of these markers in a corpus of interviews with B1 level university exchange students (CEFR). The aim is to check for the presence of phonic attenuation markers when foreign students express a divergent opinion in Spanish from that expressed by the native speaker. The analysis leads to a categorization of these markers and attempts to provide empirical basis for a better understanding of the phonic markers in the academic interlanguage.