Como in Commute: The Travels of a Discourse Marker across Languages
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Joseph Kern
Abstract
The present investigation is a mixed-method study combining quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the use of como as a discourse marker in the Spanish spoken in Southern Arizona, based on a corpus of twenty-four sociolinguistic interviews of young male and female Spanish-English bilinguals. In the speech of these bilinguals, the discourse marker como mirrors the grammaticalization of the focus and quotative discourse functions of like in English. The results of this study on the diffusion of the focus and quotative como to another Spanish-English bilingual community add to our knowledge of how discourse markers can travel both within and between communities as well as across languages and time.
© 2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Front Matter
- Contents
- Research Articles
- A Certain Future: Epistemicity, Prediction, and Assertion in Iberian Spanish Future Expression
- ‘¿Qué tengo que/de hazer?’: variación y cambio lingüístico en el seno de las perífrasis de infinitivo a partir de textos escritos de impronta oral en el español clásico
- Como in Commute: The Travels of a Discourse Marker across Languages
- Explaining Variation And Change In Spanish Peripheral Fricatives
- Linguistic Integration Of Computer And Internet Related Anglicisms In Spanish Language Web Pages
- Tonal Crowding Effects In Buenos Aires Spanish: An Experimental Study
- Book Reviews
- Domínguez: Understanding Interfaces: Second Language Acquisition And 397 First Language Attrition Of Spanish Subject Realization And Word Order Variation
Articles in the same Issue
- Front Matter
- Contents
- Research Articles
- A Certain Future: Epistemicity, Prediction, and Assertion in Iberian Spanish Future Expression
- ‘¿Qué tengo que/de hazer?’: variación y cambio lingüístico en el seno de las perífrasis de infinitivo a partir de textos escritos de impronta oral en el español clásico
- Como in Commute: The Travels of a Discourse Marker across Languages
- Explaining Variation And Change In Spanish Peripheral Fricatives
- Linguistic Integration Of Computer And Internet Related Anglicisms In Spanish Language Web Pages
- Tonal Crowding Effects In Buenos Aires Spanish: An Experimental Study
- Book Reviews
- Domínguez: Understanding Interfaces: Second Language Acquisition And 397 First Language Attrition Of Spanish Subject Realization And Word Order Variation
