Acceso usuarios
Lamar Graham
Discourse markers, according to Portolés (2001), are set phrases that convey inferential meaning about what a speaker is communicating and can serve various connective, recapitulative, or reformulative functions. Within the domain of discourse markers, there is a subset known as conversational markers which only carry pragmatic weight with little or no semantic meaning, such as eh ‘um’, este ‘this’, hombre ‘man’, and bueno ‘well’. Two particular conversational markers that are in competition with one another in San Juan de Puerto Rico are eh and este. These are known as hesitation or metadiscursive markers, whose primary discursive purpose is to fill space. This current study aims to compare the frequency of este versus the more conventional eh in San Juan, using age, gender, educational attainment as sociolinguistic variables and clausal or sentential position as a syntactic variable. Results indicate that este is the preferred hesitation marker in San Juan and that age and sentential position are significant factors in the choice of este over eh in spoken discourse
