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Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles: New perspectives
Edited by Chiara Fedriani and Andrea Sansó
[Studies in Language Companion Series 186] 2017
► pp. 439–457

Chapter 16
Functional markers in llanito code-switching

Regular patterns in Gibraltar’s bilingual speech

 | University of Bologna
Several studies have demonstrated that, in situations of language contact, discourse markers, pragmatic markers and modal particles are easily transferable from one language into the other. This contribution tries to examine how does this process take place in bilingual speech, and it discusses data from a corpus of bilingual conversations from Gibraltar. It is argued that switching of discourse and pragmatic markers, as well as modal expressions, is an extremely frequent phenomenon and, more interestingly, that regularities in this process can be found, in the form of regular and recurrent bilingual patterns. These functional elements in fact are shown to behave consistently with each other, allowing to identify class-specific patterns, and with other discourse-relevant entities such as left dislocations and pseudo-clefts.
Keywords: code switching, Gibraltar, thetical grammar, functional markers, information structure
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Functional markers in bilingual speech
  • 2.Data and methods
    • 2.1Code switching in Gibraltar
    • 2.2Regular patterns in code switching
  • 3.Pragmatic markers
    • 3.1 No : Turn yielding, agreement and something more
    • 3.2 Mira as an attention getter
  • 4.Textual relations
    • 4.1Beyond discourse markers
  • 5.Modality and illocution
    • 5.1Modality
    • 5.2Markers of illocution
  • 6.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.186.17gor
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