Abstract
This study examines bilingual discourse markers in a language contact situation. The focus is on how English-dominant, bilingual, and Spanish-dominant New York Puerto Ricans integrate English-language discourse markers into their Spanish-language oral narratives. The corpus comprises 60 Spanish-language oral narratives of personal experience extracted from transcripts of conversations with New York Puerto Ricans. After a review of the study of discourse markers in language contact situations, the use of English-language discourse markers is compared to the use of Spanish-language markers in the texts. The discussion considers the question of whether English-language discourse markers are more profitably identified as instances of code-switching or of borrowing. Finally, the essay explores how bilingual speakers integrate English discourse markers in their narratives with a pattern of usage and frequency that varies according to language proficiency.
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