Els marcadors del discurs: caracterització general

Abstract

Summary: Discourse markers have not been a central issue in language studies until a very recent time; as a result, the first attempts to define and characterize this pragmatic category can only be found in the last two decades. The aim of this paper is to review and summarize the defining features of discourse markers in Catalan. To do so, we first propose a classification of these particles, based on Portolés (2007). Following Marín (2005) and Cuenca (2006, 2017), we then describe discourse markers on the grounds of cognitive grammar and its understanding of categories as open sets with fuzzy boundaries. In this way we intend to reach a prototypical representation of the class of discourse markers in Catalan which helps to better understand the ways in which they differ from other language categories and the functions they fulfill in discourse construction. Keywords: Discourse markers, grammaticalization, cognitive grammar, text construction, metadiscourse