CAN PROSODY DETERMINE THE DEGREE OF GRAMMATICALIZATION OF DISCOURSE MARKERS? A PRELIMINARY STUDY

Abstract

One of the characteristics generally attributed to the processes of grammaticalization is attrition or phonic reduction. This reduction increases as the grammaticalization process advances, being the more grammaticalized variants generally more unstressed than their lexical counterparts. In the case of discourse markers and particles, attrition is not as frequent a feature, but a particular loss of phonic substance has been attested, related to its prosodic configuration. The present paper aims to check if the latter phenomenon applies to Spanish, i.e. if the more grammaticalized values of discourse markers show a greater prosodic weakening. To do so, two Spanish discourse markers, encima and o sea, both well studied diachronically, have been considered. For this purpose, a database was created with examples from oral corpora belonging to different genres; the samples have been analyzed using phonic analysis software.