Potencialidades y límites de los métodos de investigación cualitativa y cuantitativa de los marcadores discursivos interaccionales

Abstract

The objective of this article is to reflect on some difficulties that arise when we pragmatically and prosodically characterize interactional discursive markers. In particular, we refer to the analysis of the mmh particle in spontaneous conversations between Italian university students of Spanish as a foreign language. Two preliminary studies, the first, from a perceptive pragmatic perspective and the second, based on acoustic analysis (fundamental frequency, speed of speech and inflections of the intonation curves), have revealed that the polyfunctional nature of this vocalization is not fully reflected in its prosody. The difficulty is that their multifunctional nature is not limited to the fact that they fulfill different functions in the interaction, but that they also perform them simultaneously. On some occasions, the same broadcast, for example, that plays the phatic function, may also involve a collaborative reaction and / or an attitudinal expression of the listener particularly in emotions such as surprise. The same situation has been observed when it occurs in turns taking with the added function of expressing agreement and understanding. Therefore, new perceptive and acoustic studies are necessary under a more reflective perspective on how we process the data offered by experimental phonetics and what we hear.