Porque in Spanish oral narratives: Semantic porque, (Meta)pragmatic porque or both?

Abstract

This study examines the use of the Spanish connective porque (‘because’) in the oral narratives of 30 native speakers of Peninsular Spanish who watched The pear film (Chafe 1980) and were asked to retell it. Analysis of 127 instances of porque in the narratives reveals that it is used semantically in relations of consequence–cause, and pragmatically in epistemic (conclusion–argument) and speech act (utterance–motivation) relations, coinciding with the three categories of causal relations identified by Sweetser (1990). Furthermore, the study shows how the narrators use porque constructions to refer back to and reflect on their speech metapragmatically. Reflexive (i.e., metapragmatic) language deals with “the way language is able to reflect on itself, make statements about itself, question itself, improve itself, quote itself and so on” (Mey 2001, p. 177). The porque relations in the narratives were analyzed using heuristic paraphrase tests to distinguish epistemic and speech act (pragmatic) causal relations from semantic ones. The analysis shows how porque, when used pragmatically, communicates more than its literal semantic sense of cause, giving rise to what could be considered a Gricean implicature, involving a metapragmatic commentary. Although generally, the porque relations in the narratives have either a semantic or a pragmatic reading, in some cases, they may have both.