An exploration into modality, interpersonal meanings and intonation in peer interaction

Abstract

A fall-to-mid intonation in Spanish has traditionally been associated with meanings like uncertainty, incompleteness, command and politeness. In syntactic constructions, it is attested in a subject followed by a nonrestrictive relative clause and enumerations, etc. These descriptions report its high frequency use in tightly controlled speech. Yet, further research is necessary to understand better the linguistic reasons behind its presence in spontaneous speech. In this study, a sub-corpus of highly natural dialogues in European Standard Peninsular Spanish is selected from the corpus Glissando (Garrido et al., 2011) and all the instances of the tone are identified acoustically. Following the corpus linguistics methodology, we tagged instances of modal meanings manifested in the use of the specified tone, to later compute the frequency and distribution of words bearing it, as well as retrieved concordances. This allowed the identification and categorization of modal meanings expressed by the presence of the tone. The results suggest that the fall-to-mid tone can be mapped into a wide range of word categories to express deontic and epistemic modality, together with various evaluative and interpersonal meanings.