Scalar operators in the spoken spanish of Santiago, Chile: pragmatic and sociolinguistic analysis of sobre todo, al menos and por lo menos

Abstract

This study describes the pragmatic and sociolinguistic behavior of scalar operators sobre todo, al menos and por lo menos in a corpus of 120 sociolinguistic interviews of the Santiago, Chile spanish. The pragmatic analysis deepens in the polyfunctional character of these units based on their values in the different levels of the discursive activity (argumentative, enunciative, informative and modal), besides exploring the "intensifying" role of sobre todo and the codification of "enunciative vagueness" of al menos and por lo menos. The sociolinguistic analysis showed a relatively homogeneous social distribution of sobre todo, while the employment of por lo menos is prominent among the speakers of the first age group and those of the middle-high socioeconomic group and al menos, for its part, it is used mostly by speakers of the second age group and of the low socioeconomic group. However, only the variation of por lo menos was statistically significant.