Resumen

DURAN, Migdalia. Syntax and pragmatics: two levels of analysis in the issue of the utterance in the spanish of Venezuela. Letras [online]. 2014, vol.56, n.90, pp.52-75. ISSN 0459-1283.

The aim of this work is to analyze the issue of the utterance in the Spanish of Venezuela, in order to explain how this issue is integrated or related to the syntactic functions. Theoretically, the study is supported on functional syntax and on the syntax of spoken language. Regarding the methodology, it follows the functional discursive approach (Halliday 1967, 1985). The corpus studied was the Corpus del Laboratorio de Fonética de la Universidad de Los Andes, from which eight informants were selected. The sample gathered 450 utterances with conversation themes encoded in the nominal group. As a result, we find that the topic as thematic structure is expressed through syntactic structures such as: subject (53,7%), direct object (21,6%),  indirect object (14,3%) and nominal attribute (10,4%). The sentence utterances show pre-position or post-position of the theme with a function of direct or indirect object. The functions fulfilled by this thematized group are those of topicalization (Top) and/or right displacement (D.D in Spanish) or left displacement (D.I in Spanish). As a conclusion, from the perspective of functional syntax, the theme is not exclusively the subject, it can be classified under different syntactic functions and it can be at the beginning or in final position of the utterance.

Palabras clave : utterance theme; syntactic structure; Spanish of Venezuela.