Tag: (E) bueno

(1998) Spanish – BUENO

Travis, Catherine (1998). Bueno: A Spanish interactive discourse marker. In Benjamin K. Bergen, Madelaine C. Plauché, & Ashlee C. Bailey (Eds.), Proceedings of the twenty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General session and parasession on phonetics and phonological universals (pp. 268-279). Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society. DOI: 10.3765/bls.v24i1.1222. PDF (open access)

This paper presents a semantic analysis of the Spanish discourse marker bueno (something similar to ‘well’, ‘OK’, ‘alright’ in English). Four discourse functions of bueno are identified and discussed. On the basis of these functions, it is suggested that bueno is polysemous, and following the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, two definitions to account for its range of use are proposed. It is argued that these definitions reflect the way in which the meaning of the discourse marker bueno is related to the adjective bueno, meaning ‘good’. Finally, we consider the role bueno may play in the communicative realization of the norms and values of the cultures in which it is used.

 

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(2005) Spanish (Colombia) – Discourse particles: BUENO, PUES, O SEA, ENTONCES

Travis, Catherine E. (2005). Discourse markers in Colombian Spanish: A study in polysemy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

This book, a revised version of the author’s PhD thesis (Latrobe University, Melbourne, 2001) presents a semantic analysis of a set of four functionally related discourse particles that are particularly frequent in conversational Colombian Spanish. A corpus of four hours of spontaneous conversation is used to study the markers bueno ‘well, OK’, pues ‘well, then’, o sea ‘I mean, that is to say’ and entonces ‘so, then’.

Through a detailed analysis of numerous examples drawn from the corpus, and employing both quantitative and qualitative techniques, it is demonstrated that, contrary to popular belief, discourse particles are not just functional particles with indeterminate or context-based semantics. Rather, they have inherent meanings that can be identified and exhaustively defined with an appropriate semantic methodology, such as is provided by the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. This study illustrates that this approach, which has been widely applied to the semantics of the lexicon and the grammar, can be extended to the semantics of discourse-based features, supporting the notion that meaning of all aspects of language forms one semantic system. The author proposes four different meanings for bueno, three related meanings for o sea, three core meanings for entonces, and two-way polysemy for pues.

The research reported here also has implications for the study of polysemy, in that it operationalizes the little understood, but classical definition of polysemy of items with “a shared element of meaning”, and it demonstrates that the polysemous relations of discourse markers are centered around an invariant core that can be identified on the basis of their use in discourse. As one of the first corpus-based studies to present a semantic account of the multifunctional nature of discourse markers this book makes an important contribution to research on the relationship between semantics and discourse-pragmatics, and polysemy in discourse.


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(2006) Spanish (Colombia) – Discourse particles: BUENO

Travis, Catherine E. (2006). The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to discourse markers. In Kerstin Fischer (Ed.), Approaches to discourse particles (pp. 219-241). Oxford: Elsevier.

This paper presents an analysis of discourse markers based within the framework of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (Wierzbicka, 1996; and references therein). It argues that discourse markers can only be fully understood if the meaning(s) they carry when used in different contexts are exhaustively defined. Within this framework, discourse markers are treated as polysemous, having a range of different meanings all of which share some element in common. The shared element of meaning can be considered a partial semantic invariant, and it is this that ties the uses of the marker together, while other components of meaning that differ account for the variation across the range of use. Such an analysis makes a clear distinction between what is encoded in the semantics of the marker and what is encoded in its pragmatics of use. I will illustrate how this can be done through an analysis of the Spanish discourse marker bueno (‘well’, ‘good’, ‘right’), based on a corpus of conversational Colombian Spanish.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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