Dude, obvio, ho!: A cross-linguistic pragmatic account of Asturian Spanish Ho and American English Dude

Abstract

Ho in Asturian Spanish and dude in American English are both particles that originated as vocatives and have since developed grammaticalized forms that perform specific functions in discourse. A parallel analysis of these particles is possible on account of an overarching discourse function whereby the use of the particle constitutes an update by the speaker of the common ground. The purpose of the study is to test whether dude/ho implicate the sense of 'obviousness'. The authors designed a questionnaire in which 74 participants of American English and Asturian Spanish assessed the degree to which a recorded speaker was seeking to implicate that an utterance's propositional content should already be known to the listener. Results show that condition (presence vs. absence of ho/dude) and sentence type (declarative vs. imperative) are significant. Findings suggest that indeed ho/dude behave in a similar way in each language, serving a regulatory function within the mutual belief space. This study seeks to address a gap in the literature on the pragmatic functions of two discourse particles and helps to establish the validity of cross-linguistic analyses of this type.