The pragmatic meaning of the discourse marker (Ya) ves que

Abstract

The aim of this article is to characterize the construction (Ya) ves que as a discourse marker in oral colloquial Mexican Spanish. This characterization is mainly based on three features: formal fixation, loss of literal meaning and pragmatic or procedural meaning — the latter is proposed as the main argument. I analyze its pragmatic or procedural meaning in terms of two instructions to be interpreted by the hearer (they guide his inferences): a) information updating: a piece of information, known to the interlocutors but discourse new and not accessible, is recovered to make it accessible to the recipient; and b) discourse anchoring: the updated content is marked as relevant to the subsequent discourse. The examined data are taken from oral Mexican Spanish corpora: Corpus Sociolingüístico de la Ciudad de México (CSCM), Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) and Corpus del Español (CE), as well as from introspection examples. A contrastive section is included in order to illustrate the arguments proposed. The description of the pragmatic meaning of (Ya) ves que contributes to enlarge the catalog of described discourse markers in Mexican Spanish.