Direct Quotation Markers in the PRESEEA-Spain Oral Corpus: Social Stratification and Diatopic Distribution

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to carry out a study on the social behavior and diatopic distribution of direct quotation markers considering data from PRESEEA-Spain oral corpus. On the one hand, from a sociolinguistic perspective, we will focus on the relation of the use of these discursive units with criteria such as sex, age, and educational level, and, on the other hand, we will consider their productivity in the samples of each city studied. As general results, the presence of different discourse markers (pues, o sea, en plan, etc.) that introduce direct quotation has been observed, a function linked to the initial position they occupy in the utterance. Furthermore, the geolectal difference is evidenced not only in quotation markers that are of exclusive use in some urban areas of Spain, but also in the stratification patterns according to social criteria.