Estrategias de intensificación y de atenuación en la conversación coloquial de jóvenes chilenos

Abstract

(This study shows, from a pragmatic and critical perspective, how a group of Chilean speakers use discourse strategies to argue, question and emit value judgments that compromise their belief systems with respect to the institution and to the groups with which they are affiliated. It also discusses its effects, considering that all speech acts imply a threat and that, consequently, constitute in themselves an act of empowering. Intensifiers and mitigating markers are discourse resources that in colloquial conversation are linked to the concept of argumentative force and they form strategies in which ‘I’ is reinforced and expresses communicative intention in a cooperative and courteous way, or, to mitigate utterances in order to maintain the balance of the interaction. The study is empirically founded on a corpus of verbal interactions among university students, collected for the larger project, «The Verbal Interaction of University Students of Chile and Argentina» of the program «The Spanish of Chile and Argentina» (ECLAR), a co-project of Catholic University of Chile and The National University of La Plata, Argentina.)