Negociación y modalización de la intersubjetividad en el diálogo espontáneo

Abstract

Basic conversational phenomena such as feed-back, back-channeling, minimal responses and uptakers deserve being treated as specific mechanisms of one and the same dialogic process, which will be termed intersubjectivity management , or the negotiation of shared understanding. This process is regulated by means of discourse markers, a category which should not be seen in its capacity of verbal signalling only; on the contrary, multimodality seems to be the prevailing mode, and intonation plays a sometimes decisive part. In this study, intersubjectivity markers are viewed from the perspective of discourse modalization , where a scale of six modal degrees is claimed to be operative: three positive and three negative. The analysis is based on natural data from several Spanish-speaking regions and represents various spoken genres and activity types. A brief discussion will address the question to what extent and in which sense speech genre has a bearing on the usage of intersubjectivity markers.