En realidad, polysemy and polyfunctionality of a discursive marker

The present contribution examines the semantic, pragmatic and lexical ambiguity of the Spanish expression en realidad (in reality, in fact, actually). The corpus used in this study is drawn from the Corpus of the Real Academia Espafiola's data CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Espanol Actual [Reference Corpus of Present-day Spanish]). It comprises the 503 occurrences of en realidad which appear in the Cuban variety sample. After a succinct characterization of the use of en realidad as prepositional phrase (2,2 %) and as adverbial phrase (20,7 %), the focus is on the 77,1 % of the cases in which it is used as discourse marker. The contextual analysis brings to the fore a continuum between six functional values. The first two are argumentatively anti-oriented: they mark an adversative relation or a restriction on implicatures. The last four are co-oriented: they operate an explicit reformulation, a specification, a recapitulation or an argumentative reinforcement. Applying the statistical 'decision tree' method it is possible to estimate in probabilistic terms the conditions which govern the interpretation, and at the same time to account for the possible overlaps and ambivalences.

Jaar van publicatie:2017