LOS MARCADORES DE REFORMULACIÓN ALEMANES: ENTRE LA CONEXIÓN Y LA ARGUMENTACIÓN

Abstract

Reformulation markers (das heist, und zwar, beziehungsweise, namlich) are discourse units that fulfil extrapredicative functions related to text coherence and cohesion, as well as to the guiding of the inferences which facilitate the construction of sentence meaning in view of a given communicative context. Contemporary German grammars have dealt with these units in a very partial way and have not attempted to find similarities in their meaning and discursive behaviour that allow us to define reformulation markers as a pragmatic (and not a lexical) category. Our research intends to show that the comprehensive representation of a marker must comprise the identification of the metalinguistic operations that it is able to carry out and of the different kinds of relations (connexion, coherence, cohesion, rhetorical and stylistic effects, etc.) that its use elicits. For this purpose, we have analysed a corpus of samples from the reference corpus of written German IDS-Korpora, which provides sufficient and representative evidence on the different values that a specific marker can acquire in a text. The resulting data of this study confirm that connectivity is just one of the defining features of markers and that the actual reason for their appearance in text is to be found in the desire of a speaker to direct cooperatively the interpretation of discourse. Our study, which focuses on the prototypical reformulation marker das heist, leads us to conclude that the thorough description of a reformulation marker must pay attention to all dimensions of discourse and, besides, render information about the grammatical properties of the marker if it seeks to become a useful reference tool for the discursive education of learners of German as an L1 or L2.