Discourse markers in emotional contexts

This paper analyzes the role of discourse markers that are placed in the emotional reactions of a colloquial conversation, trying to see whether a metadiscursive function of "emotional reaction trigger" can be added to their usual functions of argumentation, reformulation, etc. and their usual metadiscursive functions of discourse dynamics control. The selected conversational units are therefore marked by some kind of expressive or emotional illocutive force. Thus, we are in line with the research that the Fonoemotion Group is carrying out within the EHSEE Project (Padilla et alii, 2017) and which represent a new contribution to the studies of the so-called "emotional discourse". It is approached by linguistic disciplines such as phonopragmatics Rittaud-Hutinet 1995; Acuna 2011; Carbajal et alii 2014) or phonocortesy (Hidalgo 2007; Hidalgo et alii 2010; Estelles 2013), interested in the relationship between the contextual value of the utterances and their phonic reflection in speech. The observation and analysis of spontaneous colloquial conversation show us that speech is often presented as a reflection of the emotions, attitudes and feelings of speakers (Cowie and Cornelius 2003; Padilla 2004; 2017; 2020; 2021). To carry out this research and based on the division of Ekman's six core emotions (1970; 1999), a corpus of eighty-nine emotional utterances from two real colloquial conversations has been analyzed. Utterance, act and subact have been taken as units of conversational analysis (Briz and Grupo Val.Es. Co. 2003; Grupo Val.Es.Co. 2014) and fifteen different discourse markers have been located. Although, given the extent of the sample, definitive conclusions cannot yet be drawn, some trends are noticed, such as the preference of markers for appearing in the emotional reactions of surprise and anger or the trace of the metadiscourse function of "emotional reaction trigger" common to all of them.