Echoic and non-echoic confirming affirmative responses in spoken Brazilian Portuguese

© 2018 Elsevier B.V. We describe the system of confirming affirmative responses in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) on the basis of a corpus of natural spoken dialogues between interlocutors that share a high degree of familiarity. While the BP response system has been characterized as an echo system (Sadock and Zwicky 1985), the unmarked option being a verb that echoes the verb in the antecedent utterance, our analysis reveals that this characterization only applies to polar question antecedents. Using inferential statistical modeling, we demonstrate that the echoicity of a verbal response crucially depends on the speech act of the antecedent. The use of echoic responses is more likely for antecedents in which the speaker displays a low degree of commitment to the truth of the utterance than for antecedents with a high degree of commitment. Our analysis also reveals that it is necessary to distinguish two specific verbal response types – é ‘is’ and tá ‘is’ – from other verbal responses. Whereas é has been conventionalized as a multi-purpose affirmation particle, tá is typically used to respond to orders or proposals, which is why é and tá are significantly less probable to be used as echoes than other verbal responses.status: publishe