A sociolinguistic study of the reported speech use in the PRESEEA-Seville oral corpus

Abstract

The aim of this study is to describe the reported speech use in a sample of 72 oral semi-controlled interviews taken from the PRESEEA-Seville oral corpus; we based our study on linguistic, pragmatic and social criterions. The results showed that the questioned informants preferred to use direct speech. The most frequently introducing frame was the canonic one, that means, with a verb, and decir was the most employed verb to report. The Sevillian speakers prefer to report their own and/or others’ words by using direct reported speech. The most frequent pragmatic function is to narrate personal experiences, anecdotes, etcetera. Regarding the social factors, the second generation and women showed a bigger tendency to the reported speech use. According to the informants’ educational level, the employ of this mechanism is correlated to low sociolect. It was also noticed that the reported speech predominates when the participants joining the conversation know each other.