Phraseology for disagreement in a TV multimodal corpus: A multi-level study

Abstract

This article analyzes a group of phraseological units of Spanish used in conversation to convey rejection or disagreement towards the propositional and attitudinal content of a previous speech act: we refer to expressions such as de ninguna manera, para nada o qué cojones. Our approach to the mentioned disagreement units relies on data coming from the NewsScape Library of TV news, stored at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). It is the biggest searchable and tagged multimodal corpus for several languages (mainly English and Spanish), allowing automatic searches over more than 400,000 hours of recorded broadcasts. We present an innovative analysis based on real oral interaction that is systematically examined from a multimodal perspective, what has been scarcely done so far in the branch of phraseology. The multi-level study offered in these pages is aimed at: characterizing the behavior and the pragmatic functions carried out by these units; describing the formal patterns they follow, and the general prosodic patterns accompanying their use; and, finally, detecting relevant gestures and non-verbal behavior going along their use in interaction. Our results underscore, on the one hand, the polyfunctionality and contextual permeability of this kind of conversational expressions; and, on the other hand, the need to integrate the multimodal perspective for a proper understanding of the behavior and communicative scope of this set of idiomatic units.