Deixis textual y discursiva en el discurso científico-académico oral y escrito

Abstract

As a substantial body of research has made clear, speech and writing differ in many important respects, such as lexical density, specificity and redundancy. The present study proposes a contrastive analysis of demonstrative expressions in an oral corpus of conference presentations and a written corpus of the corresponding Proceedings articles in linguistics in order to determine if oral research genres tend to select less specific and more redundant demonstrative expressions than written genres. The categories considered are (i) the deictic function performed by these expressions (exophoric, text-deictic or discourse deictic); (ii) the type of expression selected (prenominal or pronominal demonstratives); and (iii) the lexical relationship between demonstrative noun phrases and their antecedent (faithful or unfaithful). Results show that the behaviour of demonstratives does not differ substantially in research speech and writing genres: text deixis is the prevalent function; prenominal (more specific) demonstratives are more frequent than pronominal ones in almost all oral and written uses; and unfaithful demonstrative noun phrases (less redundant) prevail in both modes. Therefore, the use of demonstratives tends to the prototypical written modality in both genres. The analysis also reveals the existence of more significant differences between text and discourse deictic uses of demonstratives than between oral and written modes.