MARQUEURS PRÉSENTATIFS DANS DES INTERACTIONS INFORMELLES EN PORTUGAIS EUROPÉEN
PRESENTATIVE MARKERS IN INFORMAL INTERACTIONS IN EUROPEEN PORTUGUESE

Summary/Abstract: Presentative markers in informal interactions in Europeen Portuguese. In European Portuguese, the presentative makers are not restricted to eis, which is found only in spoken political discourse or in formal written discourse. In informal oral conversations, if one would want to translate the Italian ecco and the French voici / voilà, one would use the Portuguese discursive marker é assim. The deictic origin might explain the pragmatic and discursive value of é assim: a topic introducer and a focal point. Other functions of é assim include interaction values typical of discursive markers: guiding the interlocutor to discourse sequences whose importance the speaker wishes to emphasize, reinforcement of assertive speech acts. In other contexts, this presentative marker invites the interlocutor to imagine a script so as to better understand the communicative intention of the speaker and jointly build the meaning. Despite its diverse origins, presentative markers function in a similar fashion in different Romance languages (Zafiu 2015b). We have analyzed occurrences of é assim in several oral corpora of informal conversations in European Portuguese, with the aim of identifying different structures in which this presentative marker appears and its corresponding values.

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