El papel de la aclaración en los intercambios dialógicos

Abstract: The study of clarification in dialogical speech has been approached from the perspective that examines clarification requests, for its prerogative to solve understanding problems. As far as we know, the speech act of clarification, which may be offered without being explicitly requested, has not received much attention. The purpose of this paper is to examine qualitatively and quantitatively discourse roles that clarification plays in conversation. The analysis focuses on a corpus of semi-spontaneous speech dialogues in which two participants have to collaborate to reach a common goal. Basing on pragmatic categories coded according to an annotation scheme, it can be seen that clarification plays a crucial role in mutual understanding not only in the transmission of propositional content, but also in the dimension of interaction between interlocutors, in the development of the conversational structure, in the epistemic and evidential-inferential axes and in the metalinguistic dimension.