La conducta prosódica del vocativo en el español culto de Santiago de Chile

Abstract

This paper is based on partial results of auditory and acoustic analyses of speech samples taken mainly from a corpus of educated Spanish from Santia-go, Chile. The corpus has been gathered as part of FONDECYT project 197/ 1053, which is being carried out at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. The prosody of initial, medial and final vocatives is examined and the corresponding pragmatic values are established. Vocatives as independent utterances are not considered. The relationship between prosody and the position of the vocative is also studied. The hypothesis is that discoursal-pragmatic factors determine the dependence or independence of the vocative in relation to the prosodic pattern of the utterance.