Los marcadores del discurso. ¿Guías inferenciales de la comunicación emotiva?

This study aims to investigate whether conversational Discourse Markers (such as hombre, bueno, etc.) can function as verbal information to arouse speakers’ inferences on the emotive relation that emerges in a conversation. An emic methodology is adopted, consisting in eliciting the subjects’ perception of the emotion in two parallel corpora of dialogues (Spanish and Italian). Results demonstrate that some DMs actually function as emotive inferential indexes, but they vary according to the speaker and are highly context-dependent.