A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

(17) Spanish o sea que (Schwenter 1996:869) 27
Y eso lo dice todo el mundo.
‘and that’s what everybody (lit. the whole world) says.
o sea que debe ser verdad
[o sea que] it must be true.’
According to Schwenter, o sea que in this example “is both connective, in that it specifies
how the meaning relation between the two utterances is to be construed, and epistemic, in
that it constitutes a subjective speaker comment on the propositional content of the
second utterance such that ‘I, speaker, believe that this must be true because the whole
world says it’ ” (Schwenter 1996:869). Schwenter also comments that this is a problem
for Fraser who makes a clear distinction between discourse markers (markers which mark
a sequential relation between S2 and S1) and other commentary pragmatic markers
(markers which are pragmatic in nature) since such a distinction “ignores instances of
DMs that seem to be performing both tasks at the same time” (Schwenter 1997:869).
Koike (1996) makes a similar observation regarding the Spanish discourse marker
ya, which serves to highlight certain constituents of an utterance in order contribute an
emotional emphasis, but also to establish a cohesive link to prior discourse. According to
Koike, the emotional emphasis contributed is a feeling of intensity about the proposition
and allows a listener who perceives this intensity to become interested and involved in a
sequence of events (Koike 1996:272). This function is illustrated in the following
example.
27
Although I would prefer to provide a word-by-word gloss, the original author does not provide one.
Therefore, I cannot do so here.
50