On prosody, discourse markers and discourse units in Spanish: evidence from a spontaneous oral corpus

Abstract

Traditional analytic approaches establish a strong connection between discourse markers (DMs) and a number of prosodic cues regularly associated to them (especially pauses and strong variations in pitch), mainly on the sole basis of DMs being prescriptively written with a comma or (semi)colon placed after them. Within theories based on discourse units, minimal discourse units tend to be identified on the basis of prosodic criteria and, therefore, DMs are considered independent, minimal discourse units. This paper, however, puts this tight relationship into question by presenting a prosodic and discursive analysis of eleven discourse markers extracted from a Spanish spontaneous corpus (Val. Es.Co 2.0 Corpus, online version). Data show two main conclusions: first, that a discourse marker is, indeed, a minimal discourse unit; secondly, however, that the relationship between discourse markers and prosodic cues is neither as frequent nor as straightforward as it had been expected initially; therefore, a reconsideration of the criteria used to delimit minor discourse units needs to be done