| Summary: | This contribution explores the role of discourse markers in signaling enunciative
responsibility (ER) (i.e. a mechanism that allows evaluating the degree of authorship
displayed in texts) in a particular genre – Portuguese stand-up comedy. The research is
situated within Text Linguistics; specifically, on Textual Analysis of Discourses (Adam
2008). The main interest lies within the scope of markers of ER, which attribute different
points of view (PoV) to various parts of texts and include three categories: marker-mediators
(“de acordo com” according to, “segundo” conforming to, etc.), markers of reformulation
(“isto é” that is, “em outras palavras” in other words, etc.), and markers of conversational
structure (“bom” well, “você vê/tu vês” you see, “você sabe/tu sabes” you know, etc.).
Applying both quantitative and qualitative methods to a collected corpus, not only are the
frequency and the distribution of different categories of markers of ER analyzed, but the
equivalence of the degree of responsibility in all the three categories is questioned. The
results of the analysis show an uneven distribution among the three categories of discourse
markers of ER: while the markers of conversational structure are highly present in the oral
data, marker-mediators are almost absent. The paper then looks at the category of ER in
terms of qualitative analysis, and verifies that for marker-mediators the responsibility is
not assumed by the comedian, while in the case of the markers of reformulation there is a
partial assumption of responsibility. As for the markers of conversational structure, although
all the three categories are included in the group called “markers of ER”, conversational
structure is less perceivable and would benefit from a recategorization or another theory
to account for it.
|
|---|
