TOWARDS A USAGE-BASED PROSODY: SPEECH ACTS IN MEXICAN SPANISH

Abstract

This work shows some advances in th e study of the linguistic usage - based prosody. This kind of prosody rests on face - to - face interviews, a representative sampling of speech in different communities, a constructive view of linguistic processes, data analyzed in context, and so on. It allows proposing a number of hypotheses about linguistic development, change and variation, and an analysis generally more realistic. According to this proposal, declarative and directive speech acts are compared from a regulative point of view, and also expressi ve speech acts are studied, but from a constitutive point of view. Data are represented following the principles of stochastic optimality theory.