Expressing evidentiality through prosody? Prosodic voicing in reported speech in Spanish colloquial conversations

Abstract

The present paper attempts to establish the evidential character of the special prosodic configuration associated with direct reported discourse (DRD). A variety of expressive meanings have been commonly attributed to this marked prosodic configuration of DRD (such as expression of stance, emotion, mimicking, alignment). However, the concurrence of pragmatic/expressive meanings together with evidentiality is very frequent in ‘non-evidential’ languages like Spanish. Therefore, we argue that the prosody in DRD also signals ‘reported’ or ‘quoted’ discourse and, therefore, the presence of evidentiality. To provide evidence for this latter claim, 449 instances of DRD have been extracted from a corpus of (Iberian) Spanish colloquial conversations containing c. 150,000 words, and their prosodic behaviour has been observed. The data reveals a marked prosody in the majority of DRD instances in our corpus. Especial attention has been paid to the examples of DRD with no explicit introductory marks (e.g. verba dicendi), since 100% of them are prosodically marked. Here, the marked prosody is the only indicator of the source of information. Consequently, it stops being a redundant trait (concomitant to the presence of introductory verbs or marks): it becomes prominent and its use is not optional.