Quaderns de Filologia de la Universitat de València Estudis Linguistics

Basic conversational phenomena such as feed-back, back-channeling, minimal responses and uptakers deserve being treated as specific mechanisms of one and the same dialogic process, which will be termed intersubjectivity management, or the negotiation of shared understanding. This process is regulated by means of discourse markers, a category which should not be seen in its capacity of verbal signalling only; on the contrary, multimodality seems to the prevailing mode, and intonation plays a sometimes decisive part. In this study, intersubjectivity markers are viewed from the perspective of discourse modalization, where a scale of six modal degrees is claimed to be operative: three positive and three negative. The analysis is based on natural data from several Spanish-speaking regions and represents various spoken genres and activity types. A brief discussion will address the question to what extent and in which sense speech genre has a bearing on the usage of intersubjectivity markers.