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.