Abstract

GUILLEN ESCAMILLA, Josaphat Enrique. Haz de cuenta (que) as discourse marker of Mexico’s Spanish. A study of pragmatic variation from analysis of corpora. Cuad. Lingüíst. Col. Méx. [online]. 2022, vol.9, e242.  Epub Aug 22, 2022. ISSN 2007-736X.  https://doi.org/10.24201/clecm.v9i0.242.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the functioning of Haz de cuenta (que) as a discourse marker considering the influence of the social factors: region, gender, age, and education level. In specific, our interests are: (i) to determine which is the geographic distribution of this discourse marker in different varieties of Spanish, (ii) to describe the influence of gender, age, and education level when this marker is used in Mexico City’s Spanish, and (iii) to characterize its discourse functions. For such purposes, three corpora are analyzed, preseea (2014), Ameresco (Albelda & Estellés 2021), and Corpus Sociolingüístico de la Ciudad de México (Martín Butragueño & Lastra 2011, 2012, 2015). The results show that Haz de cuenta (que) is a discourse marker characteristic of the variety of Mexico’s Spanish and has four pragmatics functions: (i) exemplification, (ii) reformulation, (iii) enactment, and (iv) continuative. Furthermore, in Mexico City’s Spanish, this marker is used more frequently by younger speakers and medium education level speakers, while gender apparently has not a particular influence because women and men show a similar average of use. Finally, it is concluded that Haz de cuenta (que) is a dialect mark of Mexico Spanish that has had a major development over the last years.

Keywords : corpus linguistics; variational pragmatics; discourse markers; Spanish varieties.