Uses of Hum, a discourse particle for interaction in Spanish

Abstract

How the Spanish particle hum works in the interaction has been the object of comprehensive investigation but what this particle means in contrast with other Spanish cognitive particles like eh, ah or oh is still not described accurately enough. After discussing some of the main functions of this particle in two different corpus of Spanish spoken languages (Pratid -Pragmatics Annotation Tool for Italian Dialogues, composed of a set of Task-Oriented conversations- and C-Or- DiAL, which includes a series of dialogues and interviews in everyday situations), an explicative hypothesis of its value is proposed from the perspective of interaction. This paper aims at a description of its procedural instructions with a limited number of metalinguistic operations which can account for the high variety of functions that this particle carries out. Our explicative hypothesis takes under consideration a combination of the instructions of two signs: the duration in the realization of the particle and the value of the morpheme m that conforms it.