Searches and clicks in Peninsular Spanish

Abstract

Abstract The current study analyzes the use of click sounds in Peninsular Spanish with a focus on those that occur when speakers are searching for what to say and signaling a particular stance. The data corpus consists of interviews with 18 speakers from Spain who produce a total of 281 clicks. We consider clicks to be a non-lexical discourse marker that conveys information to the listener regarding how an utterance should be interpreted. By applying a discourse-pragmatic approach from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives, we examine contextual and co-textual factors that co-occur with the click and contribute to a multimodal display consisting of pauses, fillers, repetitions, prolongations, gestures and object of search. The quantitative results indicate some statistically significant differences with regard to how clicks interact with the linguistic and extralinguistic environments. Qualitatively, we show evidence supporting the idea that clicks are part of a larger multimodal communicative activity.

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