Intersecciones Hispánicas: Revista de Cultura, Literatura y Lingüística
Abstract
This paper examines discourse markers (DMs) (i.e., pues, entonces, you know, so, I mean, etc.) and their linguistic variations in contexts of English-Spanish interaction in Puerto Rico. This linguistic category represents an aspect of discourse analysis that has captivated great interest in recent years, since its “main function is to connect utterances to each other and to the larger context” (Crible and Blackwell 2020: 24). As shown in several sociolinguistic research articles conducted in the Puerto Rican diaspora of New York City in the last twenty years (Torres 1997, 2002; Lipski 2005), the profound and protracted contact between Spanish and English that Puerto Ricans have been facing for over a century makes the category of DMs very suitable for borrowing or code-switching phenomena in contexts of bilingual interaction, proving the complexity and veracity of bilingualism in Puerto Rico (Poplack 1980; Pousada 1999; Jimenez and Flores-Ferrán 2018), country defined as “a sea of functionally unilingual Spanish speakers” (Barreto 2001: 23). The present study expands the area of interest of DMs, focusing on Puerto Rican Spanish-speakers residing in the Caribbean island. In doing so, Schneider and Barron’s (2008) framework of Variational Pragmatics will be applied, using data extracted from the PRESEEA corpus (Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of the Spanish of Spain and America) of the UPRRP (University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus), as well as from YouTube videos. The use of two corpora has the aim of measuring the presence / absence of variations in the use of DMs due to extralinguistic variables such as formality (academic corpus) and informality (street interviews) of the interaction context. Furthermore, the extralinguistic characteristics of the genre have also been analyzed. All the data has been collected in San Juan, the urban center most exposed to linguistic contact with English, with the presence of both bilingual and monolingual groups. Findings reveal that in academic contexts Puerto Ricans show a general favor towards the use of DMs in Spanish, supporting the thesis that Spanish is the main language of public education on the island (Fiet et al. 1996). On the other hand, rare cases of bilingual alternation are found in the use of DMs in informal settings. This shift is considered fully accepted, since it does not compromise the meaning of the sentences in which they appear or negatively influence the follow-up of interaction in Spanish. Lastly, the participants do not show differences in the use of DMs due to gender, which moves the interest of future studies towards variables such as years of education in both languages, the degree of exposure to English in public and private schools, and the perspective of languages spoken in small spaces such as home.
Recommended Citation
Visconte, Piero. "“So, like… tú sabes”: An approach to bilingual discourse markers in Puerto Rican Spanish oral interaction (Piero Visconte, pp. 21-45)." Intersecciones Hispánicas: Revista de Cultura, Literatura y Lingüística 1, 1 (2024). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/interseccioneshispanicas/vol1/iss1/5