Adjektivbasierte Diskurszeichen in Mündlichkeit und Schrift

The investigation is situated within the framework of the Research Group working on "The Interfaces of Adjective and Adverb in Romance" (http://sites.google.com/site/rsgadjadv/). The object of investigation is directed towards adjectives that are adapted to discourse functions (e.g. the discourse marker Sp. bueno "well"). The empirical basis is a corpus of semi-informal oral Chilean Spanish recorded from interviews with domestic maids in Santiago de Chile. The corpus contains a total recording time of 9.5 hours, which corresponds to approximately 70 000 words of the maids` discourse. The Research Group supposes that the original oral tradition of Spanish can best be retrieved in oral popular American Spanish, since we follow the general hypothesis that in the oral tradition direct conversion prevails over indirect conversion with -mente, which is preferred in written texts. Previous research has confirmed this hypothesis for Romance in general (Hummel 2000), and, in the same Chilean corpus, manner adverbs (Hummel 2007), modifiers of adjectives and adverbs (2010b), and circumstantials (2009a). Direct conversion from adjectives to adverb is often discussed regarding to verb phrases (trabajar duro / duramente "to work hard" / "hardly"). It is generally ignored that sentential adverbs and discourse markers, which are sometimes classified as adverbs, follow the same pattern. In Spanish, discourse markers like claro, bueno, bien, igual, total, cierto, etc. are based on adjectives. Moreover, they are almost exclusive for orality, if we except cases of written mimesis of orality in literature (e.g. direct speech). They are clearly not tolerated by the normative rules of literacy. In literacy, derived sentential adverbs ending in -mente fill the gap, confirming thus the ties that this suffix maintains with written tradition. In addition to discourse markers, modifiers of determiner groups like incluso, solo, justo, cierto, puro, mero, mismo, nico, propio are also important for discourse, insofar as they are crucial for the development of subjective point of views in discourse. Again, these forms partially compete with correspondent forms in -mente: justamente, ciertamente, etc. The third group that uses adjectives for subjective evaluation is less subject to lexicalization than the previously mentioned groups. Examples are exacto (for a long series of affirmation particles), horrible (as parenthetical evaluative adjective), mejor (with deontic function). In sum, the data allow for a complete account on how adjective based devices are used for discourse construction and subjectivity, and how direct conversion and indirect conversion behave with respect to orality and literacy. The last chapter is dedicated to a theoretical discussion on how grammaticalization theory can or cannot explain the development of discourse function in orality and literacy. In fact, most research on grammaticalization is implicitly based on a monolithic view of language that ignores the relationship between orality and literacy. Even more, authors often postulate erroneously that oral forms derive from canonical written models, as if literacy was historically prior to orality. The book sheds a new light on the interface of orality and literacy in synchrony, it questions current diachronic assumptions, and it give a systematic account on the relationship between underlying word class and discourse function.