Teenage Talk: From General Characteristics to the Use of Pragmatic

Teenage Talk: From General Characteristics to the Use of Pragmatic

How the Pragmatic
Markers Are Used
Abstract: Pragmatic markers are multi-functional and can
serve various purposes on the three levels of conversation
discussed, and they can be used for more than one purpoe
at the same time. On the interactional level the markers
are used to open, continue and end a conversation; on the
interpersonal level they are used to address a hearer, to
check that the hearer is following, to encourage the hearer
to respond by triggering a response or to initiate a response,
and to hedge, indicating uncertainty. On the textual level,
the markers are used to connect utterances, to divide an
utterance into chunks by ‘punctuating’, to give the speaker
time to think by stalling, to serve as a quotation marker,
replacing SAY, to introduce a new topic by deviating from
the previous topic, and to intensify a positive or negative
response (pues sí/no ‘oh yes/no’).
Stenström, Anna-Brita. Teenage Talk: From General
Characteristics to the Use of Pragmatic Markers in a
Contrastive Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137430380.0010.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137430380.0010
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51
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6
52
Teenage Talk
In this chapter, I describe how the pragmatic markers introduced in
the previous chapters are used by the Madrid teenagers – and what the
Spanish markers correspond to in the London teenagers’ talk. Three levels of conversation are involved: the interactional (Section 6.2), interpersonal (Section 6.3), and the textual (Section 6.4). As I mentioned in the
Chapter 1, the majority of the markers are multifunctional, which means
that they tend to be used on more than one level, sometimes on more
than one level at a time, and sometimes even doing more than one thing
at the same time on a particular level. A quantification of the functions is
not possible, however, since the corpora lack pragmatic tagging, and since
manual tagging is extremely time-consuming. The fact that the Spanish
markers are used as a point of departure explains why they are paid more
attention than the English markers, which are also less numerous since
some match more than one Spanish marker (cf. Chapter 4).
6.2 The interactional level
On the interactional level, the markers are seen as opening, continuing, and
ending devices. A convenient distinction that embraces all of the markers occurring on the interactional as well as the interpersonal level is the
‘directive/reactive’ distinction discussed by Blas Arroyo (1998), Santos Río
(2003) and Cestero Mancera and Moreno Fernández (2008). When used as
a directive, the marker occurs in the speaker’s initiating turn where it triggers a reactive move in the listener’s immediately following responding turn,
A turn is understood as everything the speaker says before the next speaker
takes over (Stenström 1994/1999: 226), or in the terminology of Carter and
McCarthy 2006: 928), as ‘a communicative unit in speech that is both communicatively and pragmatically complete’ and consisting of ‘single words,
phrases, clause or clause combinations’.
6.2.1 Opening
There are generally no standard conversational openings and closings in
the COLAm and COLT corpora; the conversations simply start when the
recording equipment is turned on and ends when it is turned off. This
means that talk may already be going on when the recording starts with
DOI: 10.1057/9781137430380.0010
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6.1 Introduction
How the Pragmatic Markers Are Used
53
no greeting that indicates the conversational opening. Greetings may
occur later in the conversations, however, when a new speaker turns up.
In Spanish in general, a frequent way of beginning an everyday conversation is by means of ¿qué tal? (‘how are you’/‘what’s up’). A typical example
is when two friends meet in the street, and the first thing one of them says
is hola ¿qué tal? This might be answered by bien (‘fine’) or an equivalent, or
sometimes even the opposite, mal (‘poorly’), but it is very often left unanswered. In other words, what ¿qué tal? does is act as a conversational opener
and not as a real question.
The use of ¿qué tal? seems to be an intriguing question, since what
it corresponds to in English is a topic of discussion on the internet (cf.
Wordreference.com). Some questions concern the difference between ¿qué
tal? and the synonymous expression ¿cómo estás? (‘how are you?’). These are
some of the answers:
(a)¿qué tal? is equivalent to cómo (‘how?’). It is like saying cómo estás?
(‘how are you?’) and omitting estás (‘are’). ¿Qué tal? and cómo estás?
have essentially the same meaning. The difference lies in informal or
formal.
(b)qué tal? is like something you say without much interest, while cómo
estás? shows some genuine interest for the other person.
(c)you can use either one for a greeting, but they mean different things,
¿qué tal? = ‘what’s happening?’ And ¿cómo estás? = ‘how are you?’
(d)¿cómo estás? is like ‘how are you?’. The other person then says estoy
bien (‘I’m fine’) for example. The normal answer for ¿qué tal? is
something like todo bien (‘everything is okay’).
It is also pointed out that ¿qué tal? is not only a kind of greeting, something
you say when you start talking to somebody, but that it is also used, for
instance, to enquire about
* other people: ¿Qué tal Ana? (‘How is Ana’)
* things: ¿Qué tal el pastel? (‘How is the cake?’)
*events: ¿Qué tal si nos encontramos en el café de la esquina? (‘How about
meeting at the corner café?’)
*grammatical correctness: ¿Qué tal esta oración? ¿Es correcto?’ What
about this sentence?
Is it correct?).
DOI: 10.1057/9781137430380.0010
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6.2.1.1 Greeting
Teenage Talk
54
6.2.1.1.1 Functions of ¿qué tal?
Figure 6.1 shows the different functions of ¿qué tal? in concentrated and
simplified form:
Nr
Function
alone
+ estar (‘be’)
8
GREETING
¿qué tal? (‘how are you’, ‘what’s happening)
¿qué tal estás? (‘how are you?’)
+ noun
11
QUESTION
¿qué tal la Semana Santa? (‘how was Easter week?’)
alone as sentence element
11
ADVERBIAL
No sé qué tal sierra el micro (‘I don’t know how
the microphone is turned off ’)
Figure 6.1 Functions of ¿qué tal?
The adverbial function is straightforward and does not cause any identification problems; here qué tal is equivalent to the adverb cómo (‘how’).
The distinction between ¿qué tal? as a greeting and as a question is more
problematic. The safest greeting criteria are the following:
1 turn-initial position
2 a preceding hola or buenos días/tardes/noches
3 a greeting in response, for example bien (‘fine’) or ¿qué tal (tú)? (‘how
are you?’)
4 direct reference to the interlocutor(s).
Notice that, when ¿qué tal? is used as a greeting, that is, intended to make
contact, a response is not taken for granted, and frequently missing, while it
requires an answer when used as a question. Consider examples (13) to (16).
In (13), the ¿qué tal?-¿qué tal? exchange is simply a way of creating contact:
(13) Ana: hola ¿qué tal?
‘hello how are you?’
María: ¿qué tal? Oye ¿está por aquí mi
camiseta? MAORE2
‘how are you? Listen is my T-shirt here?’
Here, the greeting is followed by a greeting in response, before the dialogue
begins. The same refers to example (14), which begins as a routine opening
greeting (¿qué tal? – bien) which develops into a more question – answering
DOI: 10.1057/9781137430380.0010
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