O marcador discursivo <i>vale</i>: usos ou abusos?

Abstract

This study looks at how the Galician discourse marker (DM) vale works. This was analysed using a data base that was created from the data provided by two Galician corpora: the Tesouro Informático da Lingua Galega (TILG) and the Corpus de Referencia do Galego Actual (Corga). The development of this form of the verb valer into a DM entails, in addition to the requirement that it should work in a way distinct from its own sentence-level syntactic structure, certain contextual factors: the text needs to be in a dialogue format and the style needs to be informal. Moreover, in line with the behaviour of MDs, it may be capable of combining with other sentence-external elements and show a tendency to be isolated from the general structure. This generic definition falls short of a full characterization of its working, since its multiple discourse meanings produces consequences for some aspects of its behaviour, such as its place in discourse and the DM’s question pattern. Finally, our findings are compared with the behaviour described for DMs in two other languages: English OK and Spanish vale. In the light of these comparisons and clear parallellisms in their behaviour,it will be argued that the Galician DM vale has undergone extension in the usage of speakers over the past two decades on account of cross-linguistic pragmatic interference, based on the English formula OK and its Castilian translation, vale.