Catalan home as a discourse marker

Segues Majos, Gemma

Catalan home as a discourse marker

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Citation

Segues Majos, G. Catalan home as a discourse marker. 2019. handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10230/43012

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Abstract

In the previous literature, the discourse marker home in Catalan has been given a plurality of functions, which are depending on its immediate specific discourse context. In order to disambiguate the multifunctionality of home, this study will investigate some of its derivable components, namely, the principal function of the marker and the function that derives from its syntactic context. To this end, I have analysed the patterns observed in the occurrences of home in a corpus of oral colloquial conversations in Catalan. The results show that its principal function conveys the speaker’s attitude of rejection towards an inappropriate contextually salient act. Further, the position of the marker in either the beginning or the end of the sentence, shape its contextually derived function. In sentence-initial position, home is used to let the addressee know about the inappropriateness of a contextually salient act. In sentence-final position, home has the same function but in this position there is another function added, namely the speaker’s expectation that the addressee should do something. Therefore, these results confirm that the multifunctionality of discourse markers is derived from its principal in interaction with contextually derived functions.