Pragmatic functions and contexts of use of TIPO in European Portuguese

Abstract

This paper is the continuation and extension of a previous study on the discourse marker tipo ‘type’ in European Portuguese. Firstly, I will review the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the uses of tipo in spontaneous speech. Next, the characteristics of the contexts in which the discourse marker tipo occurs will be analyzed, including the syntactic structures and, in particular, the clusters of discourse markers with tipo and the semantic -pragmatic values that they convey. Concerning the functions of discourse markers (henceforward DMs) in discourse, the findings of studies carried out by other researchers, inter alia, provide the foundation for ongoing tipo analysis. The analysis is based on oral data from two corpora, the CRPC -Oral and the corpus Perfil Sociolinguístico da Fala Bracarense (Sociolinguistic profile of Braga speech /PSFB). Both data sets are of spontaneous speech, characterized by a colloquial register within a discursive genre, the sociolinguistic interview.