Discourse evaluation by mood and modality

Abstract

Considering that linguistic practice involves an evaluation process on the part of the speaker with respect to the hearer, the use of the markers of mood and modality are analyzed in the Spanish of the city of Valdivia (Chile). The corpus was taken from six semiformal interviews to representative speakers belonging of generation 2, of both sexes and three social groups. The results show that the general tendency of use in this speech situation is: the informative genre, the declarative mood, the indicative mood, speech acts of an informative intention, the emphazing adverbial disjunts of content, the style adverbial disjuncts of manner, the emphasizing, intensifying and focus subjuncts and the predicative adjectives (descriptive and evaluative) and intensifying adjectives. Besides, the analysis shows the variation due to sociolinguistic conditioning that represents the speaker’s evaluation in relation to his view of the world and of himself.