This book reviews studies that have utilized corpus analysis of oral
Spanish, in order to introduce the field of oral discourse. The work
focuses on social and contextual varieties, emphasizing an approach that
tackles the analysis of linguistic blocks restricted to an interactional
unit. The plan of action is explained in chap. 1. Chap. 2 deals with the
1950–1965 period (dialectology and stylistics); chap. 3 discusses
the 1966–1979 period and focuses on quantitative studies (social
dialectology, sociolinguistics, and developmental psycholinguistics);
chap. 4 corresponds to 1980–1989 and deals with discourse analysis;
and finally, chap. 5 treats the 1990–1999 period and examines the
different types of oral discourse, genre, registers, social dialects, and
textual models. The works collected for this study cover 4,241
bibliographical entries that are cross-referenced with the CD-ROM, which
displays the bibliography as a Microsoft Word document. The types of
analysis are (A) intraenunciativo, (B) enunciativo, and
(C) superenunciativo. We believe that by A, the author
refers to components of the sentence within the sentence or
intrasentential; by B he may refer to discourse at the level of
the utterance, which is the result of the speech act; and by C he
may refer to the level of the discourse, which is made of turns.