Structuring Conversation: Discourse Markers in Cervantes's Entremeses

Due to the recent shift in the linguistic pragmatics literature from the analysis of isolated speech acts to the focus on phenomena which affect the global meaning of a message, discourse markers (DMs) have become a frequent research topic. Despite their popularity, the evolution and development of these forms is often neglected in investigations on the topic. In the present study, I analyze one class of DMs known as information structurers in early modern Spanish through an examination of a set of short farces, or entremeses, published in the early seventeenth century. My research focus is threefold: I begin by identifying which DMs of this class appear in the entremeses; second, I offer a description of the employment of these forms in comparison with their uses in modern Spanish; finally, based on the results of the empirical data, I evaluate the register to which these theatrical works can most properly be said to belong. The findings of this study support the argument that these entremeses are most appropriately classified as approximations of oral varieties of the language of their time.