Cueing and construing dialogue in English and Spanish
Author
Summary, in English
This study explores the ways in which English and Spanish direct speech is portrayed through the verbs in Speech Framing Expressions (SFEs) introducing dialogues. The descriptive purpose is to identify what verb meanings are used to cue direct speech in SFEs, what lexical resources there are to express these meanings, how the meanings are lexicalized and how rich the vocabularies are. Five main semantic categories of verbs are identified: SPEECH ACTIVITY, PERCEPTION, COGNITION and EMOTION. It shows that the Spanish data feature a much more varied repertoire than the English data, and it makes more use of verbs related to the domains of thinking and reasoning, while the physical domain is the preferred focus of English. Theoretically, the study is a contribution to the debate about general typological differences in the semantics of verbs in Germanic and Romance languages. We can conclude that even though both languages have the same types of lexical resources available, their various ways of describing direct speech differ substantially. Semantically speaking, Spanish verbs are richer and more elaborate and, contrary to the received view from motion research, Spanish manner meanings play an important role in the lexicalization of many of its verbs.
Department/s
- English Studies
- Language, Cognition and Discourse@Lund (LCD@L)
Publishing year
2016-10-26
Language
English
Document type
Conference paper: abstract
Topic
- Specific Languages
Conference name
AELCO, Congreso Internacional, 2016
Conference date
2016-10-26 - 2016-10-28
Conference place
Madrid, Spain
Status
Published
Project
- MovEs-MovEinG
Research group
- Language, Cognition and Discourse@Lund (LCD@L)