Los actos silenciosos en la conversación en españolestudio pragmático y sociolingüístico

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the study of silence in colloquial conversation from a pragmaticand sociolinguistic approach. More specifically, the study was based on the observation of atest of social habits (100 young informants) and the analysis of the 1069 silences of 10 youngspeakers located in colloquial conversations (corpus of 20 hours). The study examineslanguage attitudes towards silence in the conversation of young Spanish speakers, functionsand pragmatic meanings of silence in interaction, the influence of the gender variable (ie, howsilent the women and men) and sociopragmatic valuation receiving these elements (politeness,impoliteness and "anti-politeness"). At the end of the investigation, there is a section thatanalyzes the silence from a focus of conversation analysis and reflects on the position of theseparalinguistic signs in the speaking turn (starting, interior or final position).Among the results that have been obtained in the investigation are the following: (1) pragmaticsilence has meaning; (2) women and men do not use the same; (3) the sociopragmaticsevaluations of silence depend on the context, of the social relationship between speakers andcommunicative role to play; and (4) attitudes toward silence speakers also depend on the sexof the speakers, the sociosituacional context in which they appear and communicative role ofspeakers (speaker or listener).