Prosodia y operadores argumentativos: a propósito del comportamiento del contexto entonativo en un tipo de enunciado articulado con ‘pero’ = Prodody and argumentative operators: about the internalizing role of the intonational contour in utterances connected with “pero” (but)

For the last decade there has been an uninterrupted series of studies in the Spanish of Buenos Aires whose purpose is to explore the close connection between intonation and discursive polyphony. It has been possible to demonstrate that prosodically marked forms evoke points of view which are exclusively materialized through the melodies of speech. In the following study, 10 instances of utterances connected with “pero” (but) have been analyzed. These utterances have been obtained from a corpus of 12 recordings consisting of informal conversations and radio interviews. All the cases studied here, display marked intonational features and similar argumentative orientation and force. The Theory of Semantic Blocks allowed us to explore their contextual external argumentations. Through the present study, we seek to demonstrate that the marked or expressive phonological features of utterances “p but q” carry argumentative instructions that resemble those of internalizers. The initial perception was corroborated by means of PRAAT, software of acoustic analysis. Due to the limits that any publication imposes, we only include some of the figures obtained through this softwar