Pragmatic analysis of the phraseological unit ¡calla ho!

Abstract

Certain areas of the language don’t attain a complete characterization until they are analyzed through the pragmatic perspective: phraseology is an example of this. This is why we decided to do a phraseopragmatic analysis of the idiomatic expression ¡calla ho!. At first, we pay attention to that expression as a phraseological unit, that is, as a completely institutionalized segment that shows fixation and semantic specialization. Next, we analyze the elements that compose it and the individual meaning of each of them in order to discern the motivation shown by the union of the two elements and the translating meaning that derives from it. Finally, the pragmatic analysis is developed taking into account the contexts of use through Austins’s speech acts theory, that is, in some cases the speech constitutes an exercitive act and in others a behabitive act. For this purpose, we use spontaneous speech samples that represent the contexts in which this phraseological unit can be found, with the aim of providing a description of the different uses and communicative values that it shows. These samples are taken from WhatsApp conversations, since this type of communication channel, like other chats, is characterized by communicative immediacy, regardless of the elapsed time between the emission and reception of the message, in contrast to other media that a priori may seem similar, such as email.