Discourse Markers in Colombian Spanish: A Study in Polysemy

The study of discourse markers has been a hot topic in linguistics in recent years, yet their semantics has not been dealt with in detail. This is largely due to a widespread assumption that they play a strictly pragmatic role and therefore fall outside the realm of semantics. This book applies the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to analyze a set of four discourse markers (bueno, pues, o sea, entonces), as used in a corpus of conversational Colombian Spanish. It demonstrates that these markers do carry semantic meaning and that they can be exhaustively defined. It also shows that while discourse markers are often polysemous, the range of meanings a marker has is centered around an invariant core that can be identified through examination of its use in discourse. Key Features the work will be valuable for students of discourse for the upcoming years, whether or not they are working within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (or NSM) framework its exemplary methodology makes it obligatory reading for the field

Review:

[...] of great interest to the linguists working within the cognitive approach, to researchers carrying out corpus-based studies, to scholars interested in DMs, als well as to Hispanists at large. Natalya I. Stolova in: Cognitive Linguistics 2/2008 [...] uninteresante y minucioso analisis linguistico. Axel Hernandez Diaz in: Germanistik 3-4/2007