General extenders in Spanish interactions : frequent forms, pragmatic functions "y todo eso"

Abstract

The majority of Spanish discourse analysts do not consider general extenders as a type of discourse marker (a position this paper adheres to) and as a result, not many studies have been devoted to determining their characteristics. This paper presents a description of the principal forms, semantic nature and discourse functions performed by general extenders in European Spanish. The analysis is based on a large amount of data (3,700,000 tokens from two spoken corpora, Corpes XXI and Val.Es.Co. Corpus) and considers different text types and discourse genres. The research focuses on two types of pragmatic functions attributed to general extenders that are the result of semantic bleaching, i.e., they have lost their original referential meaning in order to highlight common ground in interactions: interactive functions (politeness, hedging, intensification) and metadiscursive functions (delimitation, marking transitional relevance places and forward planning). Spanish data support the hypothesis that strong cross-linguistic similarities exist at both a formal and functional level. Further lines of research in the field of Spanish linguistics are highlighted in the final considerations.