This book sets an excellent example of how a semantic focus may enrich a theme usually identified as belonging to pragmatics. Discourse markers are usually considered to be discourse support resources (fillers). They are known in Spanish as muletillas ‘crutches’, with a negative evaluation. Because they are independent from the syntactic core structure, their presence seems arbitrary and optional. It is also generally believed that they do not contribute to the referential content of the clauses they are used in. Their use, however, is far from random; it is governed by precise conversational conditions and discourse criteria. Furthermore, they play an important pragmatic role in the verbal interaction associated with negotiation between speaker and hearer. This book with its detailed study is an excellent contribution to the field.
This study presents an analysis of a set of four discourse markers frequent in Spanish as spoken in Cali, Colombia: bueno, o sea, entonces, and pues. These markers have been previously described in morphosyntactic and pragmatic contexts, but until now they have not been semantically accounted for. The analysis is based on a corpus of several hours of conversational Colombian Spanish, registering 400 tokens of these items.
It is widely accepted that discourse markers are pragmatic devices with context-based semantics. Consequently, their meaning cannot be identified nor exhaustively described. Contrary to this belief, Travis's research shows how the pragmatic use of discourse markers is governed by their inherent meanings, which interact with context-based features, from which their pragmatic functions derive.
The pragmatic, multifunctional nature of discourse markers is explained as resulting from the interaction between an invariant semantic core and diverse occurrence contexts. The study gives a detailed account of the polysemous relations of discourse markers and allows better comprehension of the concept of polysemy in discourse.
Crucial in this approach are the inherent meanings of the forms as discourse markers and as non-discourse markers. For example, the adjective bueno and the discourse marker bueno have to be interpreted as polysemous – as forms sharing an invariant semantic core. This allows us to explain the various pragmatic functions of the markers (acceptance, pre-closing, dispreferred response, etc.) based on the adjectival meaning ‘good’.
Travis's study innovatively demonstrates that the methodology of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Wierzbicka 1996) can be successfully extended to discourse-based features. This model allows precise identification and description of aspects of meaning through semantic explanations based on a set of universals or primes (‘good’ being one of them), organized according to a semantic syntax.
The acceptance function, which refers to the speaker's answer to an offer, would be semantically based on the evaluation of this offer as something ‘good’. Consequently, the semantic explanation of bueno, marking acceptance, would be:
(1) bueno
You said something to me now
I think you want me to say something now
I say: “this is good”
Thus, the pragmatic functions of the discourse marker derive from the permanent core meaning of the adjective bueno.
