Procedural meaning and Spanish discourse particles: An experimental approach

This work aims at showing that, due to their mainly procedural meaning, discourse particles are linguistic devices used as instructions to ostensively guide a hearer during information processing. By means of a set of eye-tracking reading experiments, we have analyzed how counter-argumentative connectives and focus operators contribute to constraining inferential computations during reading comprehension. Results, based on these experiments, provide empirical evidence that allows supporting three theoretical arguments concerning discourse particles: a) discourse particles are not irrelevant devices in communication (cfr. § 2.1); b) discourse particles have a mainly procedural meaning (cfr. § 2.2); and c) the processing patterns to which discourse particles give rise in utterances depend on the interaction of two factors: the properties of discourse particles themselves and the properties of the utterances in which they occur (cfr. § 2.3).