NO SÉ CONSTRUCTIONS IN COLLOQUIAL SPANISH. PRAGMATIC VALUES AND DISCOURSIVE POSITION

Abstract

The expression of ‘not knowing’ in first person singular of the present indicative in Spanish has a variety of possibilities when it comes to its formal expression; some of them entail values which are distant from those specific to its functioning inside the predicative structure of the sentence and close to the implementation of functions related to the context of discursive marking. The present work focuses on one of those constructions, the phrase no sé, in those uses where it does not form part of a predication structure with a direct object. Its tracking within a corpus of spontaneous oral conversations serves as the basis for its formal and functional description with the support of (i) the colloquial conversation segmentation model of the Val.Es.Co. group, in the last joint overview offered in relation to its system of units (Grupo Val.Es.Co., 2014), (ii) the proposal for syntax figures made by the GARS group (cf. Blanche-Benveniste, 1985, López Serena, 2007); and (iii) the functional approach to the behavior of discourse markers in the continuum between communicative immediacy and communicative distance carried out by López Serena and Borreguero Zuloaga (2010). Triangulating the results obtained with the three types of analyses performed makes it possible to identify interesting correlations between certain pragmatic values and specific regularities as well as to complement the information already supplied by several dictionaries of particles, markers or operators in Spanish. From a theoretical point of view, the article stresses the great extent to which the analysis of discursive constructions −which, like the one examined here, «exceed the scope of discourse markers» (cf. López Serena, 2011a)− can benefit from considering the type of discursive unit where they appear, as well as the types of syntax figures with which they converge.