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Epistemic adverbs of low speaker-commitment in Colombian Spanish

Author

Jarrett, Dylan Stewart, author.

Title

Epistemic adverbs of low speaker-commitment in Colombian Spanish / Dylan Stewart Jarett.

Format

E-Book

Published

[Bloomington, Indiana] : Indiana University ; Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2022.

Description

1 online resource (xv, 252 pages) : illustrations (some color) Thesis Ph. D. Indiana University 2022

URL

Access for [All Campuses] - (Available on campus and off campus with authorized logon)

Other contributors

Indiana University, Bloomington. Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Indiana University, Bloomington. degree granting institution.

Notes

"Department of Spanish and Portuguese." Advisor: Amaral, Patricia. Includes bibliographical references. Text in English with scattered Spanish.

Summary

Traditionally, the set of Spanish epistemic adverbs referred to as adverbios de duda ('adverbs of doubt'), e.g., a lo mejor, quizas, tal vez ('maybe', 'perhaps') have been considered an adverbial class characterized by their shared semantic value of expressing low speaker-commitment to the truth of an expressed proposition (RAE-ASALE 2009). However, research on synonyms has shown that very rarely does a set of words said to have the same semantic value behave uniformly in natural language use (DiMarco et al. 1993; Liu & Espino 2012). This dissertation considers six epistemic adverbs in Colombian Spanish (a lo mejor, de pronto, posiblemente, quiza, quizas, tal vez), analyzing the group of adverbs using multiple methodologies in order to determine what linguistic factors condition their use and how their pragmatic meanings distinguish them from one another. Also crucial to the dissertation is bettering our understanding of the ways in which epistemic modality relates to other semantic domains such as evidentiality (Chafe & Nichols 1986) and pragmatic functions such as speech-act mitigation (Sbisa 2001) and textual cohesion (Halliday & Hasan 1976).Results of the dissertation show that epistemic adverbs of low speaker-commitment in Colombian Spanish can be distinguished by their distributional restrictions, by their propensity to mitigate speech acts, and by their association with speaker reliability as characterized by domain-specific expertise. These results are derived from four unique studies: 1) a corpus study which determines both the common and distinctive distributional factors of the six adverbs, 2) a corpus study and subsequent analysis of pragmatic meanings expressed by the epistemic adverbs, 3) an acceptability judgment task which investigates the acceptability of three of the adverbs carrying out different interpersonal pragmatic functions, and 4) a forced-choice preference task which determines the degree to which the adverbs posiblemente and quizas are associated with notions of speaker expertise and access to evidence. Together, these four studies not only provide a thorough linguistic account of epistemic adverbs in Colombian Spanish, but also deepen our understanding of the range of pragmatic meanings expressed by epistemic adverbs and how these meanings are related to, or develop from, epistemic meaning more generally.

Subject headings

Spanish language--Dialects--Colombia. Spanish language--Semantics. Spanish language--Modality. Pragmatics. Spanish language--Morphosyntax.

Genre heading

Academic theses.

ISBN

9798834024729