Comment clauses and the emergence of new discourse markers: Spanish lo que es más

El presente trabajo tiene por objetivo analizar el comportamiento de la construcción lo que es en casos como “pero lo que es tablados y Teatro de Verano, es muy poca gente la que sale”. Al momento de consultar la literatura sobre el tema, se ha encontrado un gran consenso en que dicha estructura es una perífrasis de relativo. Sin embargo, el análisis revela que lo que es se comporta como un marcador discursivo de concreción/ejemplificación. Si bien esta última hipótesis comparte muchos atributos con la de la perífrasis, entender que lo que es es un marcador describe, aunque de manera teórica, más adecuadamente el fenómeno para su ulterior aplicación en la enseñanza de Español como Lengua Extranjera. Se ha repasado de manera crítica la literatura sobre el tema y se han expuesto argumentos que defienden la inclusión de lo que es en la categoría de los marcadores discursivos en general y de los marcadores de ejemplificación/concreción en particular.

This essay explores Antonio Gamoneda’s poetry as an Adornian form of testimony. With its enigmatic foregrounding of lies, the book-length poem Descripción de la mentira ‘Description of the Lie’ can be read as a “contradictory testimony” in which the act and memory of witnessing go, as it were, underground—only to resurface, rife with loss, years after Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Yet the abstruse character of this poetic writing prevents readers from drawing straightforward political truths about Spanish history from the poem. Losses are inscribed in the text catachrestically, as they truly are: losses. Gamoneda’s poetry has been read amid changing representations of Spain’s recent past, and thus contrastingly seen as an “undecipherable symbolic code” and as “realm of memory.” This reading, which draws on Holocaust studies, allows for a redefinition of the fraught place of modern poetry in the field of Hispanic cultural studies. Examining Descripción de la mentira within the context of the debate about historical memory in Spain sheds light on the theoretical difficulties that dominant aesthetic tendencies encounter in the study of how Spanish poets of recent decades try to establish a dialogue with the reader regarding society, memory, and reality.

<p><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span>This is a part of a broader research about discourse markers in consversational storytelling, and has been carried out by the author on a bilingual (Catalan/Spanish) corpus. The paper focuses on markers such as </span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span><em>resulta que, lo que passa és que </em></span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span>and </span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span><em>el cas és que, </em></span></span></span><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span>whose function consists of the introduction of new discourse topics.</span></span></span></p>

The construction lo que pasa es que ‘what happens is that’ is a Spanish discourse marker that was originally a pseudo-cleft construction. Before becoming grammaticalized, the verb pasar contained its full lexical meaning ‘to happen,’ but later evolved into a fixed expression losing its lexical meaning and acquiring an implicit contrastive and causal meaning. The present study aims to describe the construction’s evolution on the path of grammaticalization in relation to Traugott’s (1989) three semantic-pragmatic tendencies. In addition, a Usage-based Theory approach is employed in order to describe some of the formal aspects of the construction. Using two corpora, CORDE and Corpus del Español, all instances of the construction were located and analyzed with regard to function and usage in context. Results indicate that the construction was first used in the 16th Century and that its evolution as lexical > concessive > epistemic is in line with Traugott’s tendencies. Mechanisms of change such as chunking and phonetic reduction and loss of compositionality and analyzability, as well as increase in overall frequency are also discussed in relation to this construction, lending further support to Usage-based theory.

This paper deals with matrix copular inferentials of the type “That’s love for you” and “El amor es lo que tiene”. Specifically, it shows that these configurations exhibit an early stage of grammaticalization, characterized by an increase in pragmatic significance and subjective expressiveness. It also demonstrates that the semantico-pragmatic (including discoursefunctional) properties of these constructions in English and Spanish lend further credence to the Traugottian context-based view of grammaticalization as involving two distinct yet related subtypes. The first one, pragmatic strengthening, is argued here to give rise to a shift from identifying attribution to characterizing attribution, thus expressing a positive or negative evaluation by the subject/speaker regarding the entity/person encoded in the lexical filler. The second one, at a textual level, results in these constructions functioning as summative discourse markers. Moreover, this paper offers a constructionist overview of the place of these inferential constructions within the family of focusing constructions.

The current study aimed at justifying that updating or upgrading the mastery on discourse markers (DMs) could improve the students’ reading skills. It is arguably true that DMs do facilitate readers to comprehend texts in terms of the logical and grammatical relation. Therefore, an action research involving 21 students randomly selected as the subjects of the study were conducted in Reading Classes. Pre-test, Post-test 1 and Post-test 2 were administered to generate the data consisting of the progress of their reading skills. Theoretical insights on DMs (function and uses) were also highlighted including the teaching procedures to support the findings of the classroom action research. It turns out that despite the fact that there are 4 types of DMs, only three of them were mostly used in the reading texts, namely contrastive, elaborative and inferential markers. Updating or upgrading DMs proves effective to improve the students’ reading skills as there were increases in scores to indicate improvements.
 Key words: discourse markers, action research, reading skills

Intonation is the rise and fall of the voice while speaking. It expresses the attitudes and emotions and have a grammatical, discourse, linguistic, psychological and indexical functions. It makes significant and systematic contributions to utterance interpretation. This study sought to investigate the types of meanings and pragmatic functions that the discourse markers (طيب /Tayyib/ O.K, خلاص /xala:S/ (that’s it), إن شاء الله InshaAllah (God willing), ما قَصَّرْت /ma gaSSart/ & ما قَصَّرتِي /ma gaSSarti/ (much appreciated), لا لا /la: la:/ (no…no), يا ستي /ya sitti/ (ma’am), يا سلام /ya sala:m/ (wow), يا عيني /ya ؟eyni/, يا مسهل /ya: msahhil/ (asking God for making things easy), and يا ساتر /ya sa:ter/ (Oh My God) have when each is uttered with different intonation patterns in spoken Colloquial Arabic. Twenty student-translators received training in uttering the discourse markers with different intonations, identifying the meaning and/or purpose conveyed by each intonation, then they performed an elicitation and a judgment/interpretation task in which they were required to pronounce each discourse marker out loud with as variety of intonations and identify the meaning conveyed by each. Data analysis showed that each discourse marker has a variety of meanings and pragmatic functions when uttered with different intonations. The context makes it clear which meaning each intonation implies. Results of the interpretation of meanings that each discourse marker in the sample are reported in detail.

The present study examined how the Egyptian EFL students competently use the FL discourse markers. In other words, how the Egyptian EFL learners can properly differentiate between the syntactic and textual functions of such markers. Data were collected through the instruments of pretest and posttest. Eighty Egyptian EFL students enrolled at the Department of Languages and Translation, Higher Institute for Specific Studies, Haram participated in the present study. They were divided into a control group and an experimental group with forty participants each. The experimental group participants were taught the syntactic and textual functions of the FL discourse markers. Data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The Paired Samples T-Test and the Independent Samples T-Test indicated statistically significant improvement of the experimental group participants’ use of FL discourse markers over their control group counterparts. The present study emphasized the importance of adopting the pedagogically-oriented linguistics perspective in teaching FL discourse markers to the Egyptian EFL learners.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:This paper deals with the grammatical properties of discourse markers (DMs), specifically their ordering preferences relative to one another. While the data presented here are synchronic, we approach the topic of DM sequencing from the perspective of grammaticalization. From this perspective, DMs can be understood as the result of a process in which elements serving other functions, for example grammatical functions at the level of sentential syntax, come to be conventionally used as markers of discourse-level relations, or what Schiffrin (1987: 31) operationally defined as “sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk.” Here we are concerned with the final outcome of this process. We ask: to what degree do fully formed DMs retain or lose the grammatical properties associated with their previous role, specifically their syntactic co-occurrence constraints? In other words, what degree of syntactic decategorialization (in the sense of Hopper 1991) do DMs display?

This study is the first attempt at detecting formal and positional characteristics of single-word simple discourse markers in a spontaneous speech sample of Hungarian. In the first part of the research, theoretical claims made in the relevant literature were tested. The data did not confirm or only partially confirmed the claims that Hungarian discourse markers (i) occur in turn-initial position and (ii) are prosodically independent, that is, are flanked by a pause on either side. In the second part, we looked at word forms both occurring as discourse markers and having syntactic functions in order to determine the features and cues which help us during speech perception to identify and distinguish between syntactic and discourse marking functions. The points of analysis were as follows: the position of the given word form in the clause, the degree of lenition in its articulation, the duration of the word form, the modulation of fundamental frequency, and the occurrence of sentence stress, if any, on the word form at hand. The results show that one or the other, or some combination, of these various factors may play a role in the perception process in certain instances only; this suggests that other parameters, yet to be explored, are also involved in the identification of these functions.

In the last decades, the literature on discourse markers has seen a rapid growth, both in Spanish and other languages (Portolés 1998; Martín Zorraquino y Portolés 1999; Placencia y Fuentes 2019; Messias et al. 2020). Discourse markers (linguistic units such as sin embargo, es más, con todo, mira, pues, al fin y al cabo, bueno) had been ignored in linguistic descriptions, mainly on the grounds that they do not participate in the syntactic construction of the clause, nor do they contribute propositional meaning to the sentence. Intuitively, these expressions were associated with discourse or interactional values which, until some decades ago, were not supported by rigorous theoretical frameworks in linguistic studies. As suitable theoretical tools to approach the meanings and functions of this group of linguistic units developed, the wave of literature on discourse markers took off. This chapter offers an overview of Spanish discourse markers, the meanings that they contribute to the discourse and their main classes, and introduces some of the current approaches to discourse markers, which have become a critical object of study in the interface between grammar, pragmatics, discourse and cognition.

In discourse, the elementary text spans are semantically connected by coherence relations. Discourse markers linguistically realize the coherence relations in the surface form. On the other hand, by text aggregation, redundant entities are eliminated, resulting in more fluent, coherent, and concise text. For any but the most application of text generation, appropriate discourse marker selection and text aggregation are two important aspects for coherent text generation. In this paper, we explore the prevalent syntactic aggregation constructs in Bengali and present a rule based approach towards generating Bengali compound sentences using the identified constructs. We present a user based evaluation to validate our approach. At the end, we have also given an outline of a corpus based approach for generating suitable discourse marker in Bengali.

In daily communication, the lexical items “like”, “well”, and “you know” can serve as discourse markers (DMs). Research on DMs has revealed a various functions as different types of particles, such as the conjunctional use of “like” and the semantically unidentified phrase “you know”. However, there are no formal indications in the ESL grammar books that address the function of the DM “like” as a conjunction. In their book How English works: A grammatical practice book with answers, Swan and Walter define “like” as a preposition that comes before nouns or pronoun (Swan 1997). Some given examples are as follows: He runs like the wind. She looks like me. However, they refer to the conjunctional function of “like” as informal and cannot occur in writing. This paper investigates the function of the discourse marker “like” in actual discourse and the possible criteria that determine the status of “like” in the present day. Additionally, the paper examines the prescribed grammatical function of “like” in ELS grammar books. Finally, the paper suggests specific pedagogical recommendations that could be considered in a sustained ESL field of learning and teaching.

Within the theoretical framework of dependency grammar, the current research quantitatively explores the syntactic functionality of Discourse Markers (DMs), specifically focusing on and, but, and so in the discourse of TED talks as the primary subject of analysis. Using the distance-driven metric of Mean Dependency Distance (MDD), we observe that sentences featuring a DM at the onset exhibit heightened syntactic complexity compared to their counterparts without DMs. Beyond demonstrating the syntactic relevance of DMs in natural language sentences, our findings provide insights into the relationship between the syntactic role of DMs and human cognitive processes, suggesting that sentence-initial DMs may tend to coincide with complex syntactic structures, thereby implying the upcoming processing challenges and a heightened cognitive load. Hypothetically, this indicates a potential essential syntactic function of DMs: acting as a preliminary indicator of enhanced processing demands, equivalent to a priming for complex linguistic processing.

The present article aims to outline the pragmatic functions of discourse markers viewed as language items structuring discourse. This issue requires thorough research not only from the language theory viewpoint but from linguоdidactic, particularly pragmalinguоdidactic, viewpoint as well. We focus on the pragmatic potential of grammatical discourse markers. These are pragmatic idioms, infinitive constructions and tag questions. The results of the material analysis from the 4English corpora (BNC, COCA, NOW, iWeb) enabled to demonstrate the complex of functions that these grammar patterns perform in the discourse: etiquette, motivation for action, reproach, regret etc., they are also characterized by polifunctionality. In addition to grammatical discourse markers, the issue of functional patterns of lexical discourse markers is addressed. As far as they determine the syntactic pattern of a sentence, they can perform grammatical pragmatic function as well. Their meaning is to express the degree of certainty of the speaker about the information given in the utterance. Intentional training of L2 learners in the use of discourse markers patterns enables to maintain the principles of authentic discourse-based approach to teaching a foreign language.