A sociopragmatic study of un poco in the semicontrolled interviews

Abstract

This article analyses the use of the locution un poco in a sample of 48 oral semicontrolled interviews collected between 2009 and 2018 and taken from the PRESEEA-Seville oral corpus (Repede, 2019a, 2019b). Thus, we realize a quantitative and qualitative study of the different uses and functions of this construction and its sociopragmatic distribution in the city of Seville. The results show that un poco is overwhelmingly employed as a discourse operator which is used to mitigate, intensified, approximate or reformulate the speech act. Consequently, the most common function of the construction un poco is the mitigator one and it is used to protect the speaker’s image. Regarding the social factors, women show a bigger tendency to the employ of this function, while men use un poco with the approximative value.