"No sé" as a discourse marker in Spanish: a corpus-based approach to a cross-dialectal comparison

• Autores: Javier Rivas, Esther L. Brown
• Localización: A survey of corpus-based research / coord. por Pascual Cantos Gómez, Aquilino Sánchez Pérez, 2009, ISBN 978-84-692-2198-3, págs. 631-645
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 1 Cita
• Resumen

  • The purpose of this study is to determine the form(s) and function(s) of no sé through the analysis of 820 tokens that we extract from three corpora of spoken Spanish in New Mexico, Puerto Rico and Madrid, Spain. The results of our quantitative analysis suggest that, like I don´t know (Bybee & Scheibman 1999), no sé is stored in the lexicon as a chunk in these three dialects. This analysis is reinforced by rates of phonological reduction of wordinitial /s/ in New Mexico. Our results also reveal that no sé has similar discourse functions in the three varieties.

    However, other factors such as frequency of occurrence and use of first-person yo show that there are important dialectal differences. As a discourse marker, no sé has a limited use in New Mexico, whereas Madrid is the most advanced variety. The Puerto Rican variety holds an intermediate position.