Prosodic modulation as a mark to express pragmatic values: The case of mitigation in Spanish

Abstract

One of the functions of prosody in discourse is to convey pragmatic values that add up to the core semantic meaning of spoken units or segments. Regarding mitigation, Caffi (1999: 890) specifically discusses “the very important prosodic and kinesic means of mitigation, such as changes in pitch prominence, rhythm, speech rate, as well as eye-contact, gaze, gaze aversion, smile, particular postures, etc.”In this paper, I focus on some prosodic factors such as pitch, intensity, duration and speech rate that can be used in European Spanish, in combination with pragmatic meanings. The first aim is to establish a theoretical deliberation on prosody as a clear marker to convey pragmatic meaning. The second is to clarify a very complex casuistic, with mitigation being considered as an initial clue to that realizing aim. As I problematize in this paper, the lowering of prosodic expression is not the only phonic mechanism that expresses mitigated meanings; there are additional possible situations, such as mitigated segments expressed by means of phonic emphasis instead. Moreover, discourse segments can be mitigated using only phonic means (i.e. without the concurrence of verbal elements). In conclusion, this paper attempts to outline this complex panorama in which prosody, associated with non-linguistic factors such as face, can be used as a trigger to express (and later, identify) meanings that depend heavily on contextual interpretation.