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Bilingual discourse markers in Puerto Rican Spanish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2002

LOURDES TORRES
LOURDES TORRES
Affiliation:
Latin American & Latino Studies Program, DePaul University, 802 West Belden Avenue, Chicago, IL 60614-3214, ltorres@depaul.edu
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Abstract

This study examines bilingual discourse markers in a language contact situation. The focus is on how English-dominant, bilingual, and Spanish-dominant New York Puerto Ricans integrate English-language discourse markers into their Spanish-language oral narratives. The corpus comprises 60 Spanish-language oral narratives of personal experience extracted from transcripts of conversations with New York Puerto Ricans. After a review of the study of discourse markers in language contact situations, the use of English-language discourse markers is compared to the use of Spanish-language markers in the texts. The discussion considers the question of whether English-language discourse markers are more profitably identified as instances of code-switching or of borrowing. Finally, the essay explores how bilingual speakers integrate English discourse markers in their narratives with a pattern of usage and frequency that varies according to language proficiency.

Keywords

Languages in contactbilingual discoursediscourse analysisdiscourse markers
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , January 2002 , pp. 65 - 83
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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