ARROYO, Blas de (2011) - From Politeness To Discourse Marking

Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 855–874
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Pragmatics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
From politeness to discourse marking: The process of pragmaticalization

of muy bien in vernacular Spanish
José Luis Blas Arroyo *
Catedrático de Lengua Española, Departamento de Filología y Culturas Europeas, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Universitat Jaume I,
12071 Castellón, Spain
A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T
Article history: In this paper a conversation analysis approach is adopted as the basis for a qualitative
Received 4 February 2009 study of the adverbial phrase muy bien, which is widely employed in evaluative and polite
Received in revised form 26 September 2010 contexts in standard Spanish. The study shows how this expression has expanded its range
Accepted 5 October 2010
of functions to act as a discourse marker in the vernacular Spanish of Castellón (Spain). In
spoken discourse, muy bien has a number of different uses. For instance, it can function as
Keywords:
an affirmative answer in reactive interventions, or as a signal of self-confirmation or self-
Discourse marker
Evaluative marker correction in initiative turns. Moreover, it also has other metadiscursive functions such as
Conversation analysis that of introducing new topics or redirecting old ones. The multifunctionality of this
Pragmaticalization adverbial phrase is a consequence of a process of pragmaticalization, that is to say, a
Grammaticalization semantic blurring away from the referential meaning towards more procedural and
Politeness discursive ones in different conversational contexts. Furthermore, the issue of formal and
Spanish semantic convergence with oral Catalan (in its Valencian variety) is discussed.
ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
In recent decades, the analysis of discourse markers has undergone a considerable degree of development within
linguistics. They have been studied from a number of theoretical perspectives, including conversational analysis, speech act
theory, relevance theory, and different text linguistic approaches (Blakemore, 1987, 1993; Knott and Sanders, 1998;
Montolío and Unamuno, 2001; Taboada, 2006).1 From a sociopragmatic perspective, discourse markers have also been
linked to the expression of linguistic politeness, due to the function they have in negotiating interpersonal relationships and
in taking into account the interlocutors’ face (e.g. Maschler, 1994; Chodorowska, 1997; Chodorowska-Pilch, 1999; Beeching,
2005; García Negroni, 2002; Vann et al., 2002; Stewart, 2005; García Vizcaíno and Martínez Cabeza, 2005; Pons, 2008; Briz
and Hidalgo, 2008). At the same time, this interest in the study of discourse markers has spread to a number of different
languages, as can be seen in recent work on English, Hebrew, German, Catalan and – our main concern here – Spanish, a
language for which a growing body of literature in this area includes general studies (Cortés Rodríguez, 1991; Fuentes, 1996;
Martín Zorraquino and Montolío, 1998; Portolés, 1998; Martín Zorraquino and Portolés, 1999; Santos, 2003; Vázquez Veiga,
2003; Travis, 2005) as well as analyses that focus on specific units such as bueno, pues, o sea, bien, among others, bien. These
studies have provided detailed descriptions of the meanings that discourse markers can have at different levels of
conversation analysis, including the textual, interpersonal or metalinguistic ones. Nonetheless, rigorous analyses often
* Tel.: +34 964729625; fax: +34 964729261.

E-mail address: blas@fil.uji.es.
1
Fraser (1999: 932) has, in fact, described discourse markers as ‘‘a growth industry in linguistics’’.
0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.10.002
856 J.L. Blas Arroyo / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 855–874
reveal that discourse markers are multifunctional and may act at several of these levels at the same time (Schiffrin, 1987,
2001; Jucker, 1993; Jucker and Ziv, 1998).
Despite the growing interest in these pragmatic units in Spanish, there are still some gaps to be filled, especially in the
areas of sociolinguistic and dialectal research. Although the number of studies conducted on both oral speech corpora and
written texts in Spanish has increased in recent years, to date little research has been carried out on the sociolectal and
stylistic distribution of Spanish discourse markers.2 Moreover, there is a strong case for extending the range of dialectal
varieties and discourse genres studied, as there is growing evidence that conventional linguistic units frequently expand
their functional range, acquiring additional functions that are typical of discourse markers (De Fina, 1997; Montolío and
Unamuno, 2001).
In this paper, we will focus on the analysis of one of these units in a vernacular variety of Spanish that has been in contact
with Catalan for many centuries (Blas Arroyo, 2004; Sinner, 2004; Sinner and Wesch, 2008; Blas Arroyo, 2011).3 In the speech
communities of Castellón (Valencian Region, Spain), the use of the expression muy bien as a discourse marker appears as one
of the most salient features of the local vernacular, to the extent that it is viewed as stereotypical of this variety by many
speakers from other areas within the Valencian Region, where such usage is much less frequent or even nonexistent. The use
of this marker occurs, above all, in oral conversation in Spanish, although it is also commonly found in the interactions that
take place in Catalan (in its Valencian variety).
As we will show in the pages that follow, within these contact varieties muy bien has clearly undergone a process of
pragmaticalization, which has allowed it to develop from its conventional use in verbal interactions (often related to
politeness) to other vernacular discursive functions that are generally associated with discourse markers. In the following
section, we will provide some examples to illustrate this process, offering an interpretation of its more vernacular uses as a
discourse marker (section 2). Examples here are taken from the Macrocorpus Sociolingüístico del castellano hablado en
Castellón y sus comarcas (MCSCS), a corpus of oral speech with a total size of close to 1.5 million words. The data for this
qualitative study were taken from a sample consisting of 25 interviews that can be considered to be representative of several
different social groups in Castellón.4
The core section of this paper (section 3) provides a detailed analysis of the different functions that muy bien can perform
in discourse, using conversation analysis as our basic analytical tool (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975). A point of special
importance in our study is the distinction between initiative and reactive turns. This difference is essential in order to
understand the multifunctionality of the discourse marker within the context from which the oral speech data were drawn, i.
e. the sociolinguistic interview. Other pragmatic approaches to discourse, such as theories on verbal politeness, will also be
used to illustrate the process of pragmaticalization that the expression has undergone (section 4). Finally, the main
conclusions that can be drawn from the study will be summed up in section 5.
2. The use of muy bien as a vernacular element of oral discourse in Castellón
As pointed out above, the phrase muy bien is one of the most characteristic expressions in the speech of the Castellón area
(Blas Arroyo et al., 1992). In the present study, the dialectal use of muy bien does not refer to the conventional uses of the
adverbial phrase, which can be found in any variety of Spanish, but to others of a far more idiosyncratic nature. This
difference can be seen quite clearly by contrasting the instances of muy bien in the dialogue fragments that follow, taken from
the abovementioned MCSCS:
(1)
I: Y luego mi padre me ha dicho que algunos fines de semana me puede coger para hacer de extra de camareras, en
banquetes o comuniones o cosas así
E: Ah, muy bien sí? pues muy bien, oye, genial
?
I: Así me saco un dinerillo

E: Genial, claro que sí (MCSCS 129)5
(‘I: And then my dad said to me that he can take me on some weekends to help the waitresses, at wedding receptions or first
communions or things like that
E: Oh, right. Did he? Well, that’s great, really, brilliant!
2
Some exceptions are studies by Serrano (1999, 2001), Andersen et al. (1999), Zavala (2001) and Madfes (2004).
3
The idiosyncrasy of these contact varieties, which has been demonstrated in several studies (cf. Pfaff, 1982; Hill and Hill, 1986; Thibault and Daveluy,
1989; Salmons, 1990; Maschler, 1994; Brody, 1995; Solomon, 1995; Sankoff et al., 1997; Zavala, 2001; Torres, 2002) also affects the discourse unit that this
paper will focus on.
4
The MCSCS can be consulted in electronic format at the Sociolinguistics Laboratory of the Universitat Jaume I. Moreover, these interviews have recently
been published as part of a CD-ROM entitled Corpus sociolingüístico de Castellón de la Plana y su área metropolitana (CSCSAM) (Blas Arroyo (coord.), 2009),
which includes a representative sample of 72 speakers, balanced in terms of sex, age and level of education.
5
The numbers in parentheses refer to the sociolinguistic interview from which each excerpt was taken in the MCSCS. Furthermore, to transcribe the
examples, we followed the simplified version of the conventions employed by the Valesco group (Briz and Hidalgo, 1998). The English translations in each
case are our own.
J.L. Blas Arroyo / Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 855–874 857
I: That way I can earn myself a bit of cash

E: Brilliant, of course you can’)
(2)
I: (. . .) y aparte de eso pues, cariño, no hemos hechoo mucha más cosa, ya allí ya fue el final, pero como ahora, que la
Semana Blanca, eee, luego vienen Navidadess, luego viene Pascuaa, que si el verano. . .
E: que si San Sebastiáan
I: que si San Sebastiáaan
E: que si puentes, que si Carnávaales
I: muy bien, que todo eso, muchas vacaciones, que a lo mejor llega un viernes y un puente, que luego umm a nivel de los que
trabajamos, es un problema, porque los niños qué hacemos con los niños? (MCSCS 328)
?
(‘I: (. . .) and so apart from that, honey, we haven’t done a great deal, and that was it, it was all over, but now we’ve got
the week off to go skiing, er, then it’ll be Christmas, and then it’s Easter, and summer
E: and San Sebastián
I: and San Sebastián
E: and long weekends, and Carnival
I: right, all that, a lot of holidays, you know, you probably get to a Friday and a long weekend, and then, er, you know,
for those of us who work it’s a problem, because of the kids – what are we going to do with the kids?’)
In fragment (1), the interviewee (I hereafter) is talking about her plans for the next summer, which include the possibility
of working as a waitress in the family business. The expectations this activity generates are acknowledged politely by the
interviewer (E hereafter) in her speech turns (‘‘Ah, muy bien Sí? Pues muy bien, oye, genial’’, ‘Oh, right. Did he? Well, that’s
?
great, really, brilliant!’). Note the accumulation of signals that reflect E’s deliberately approving attitude, such as the use of
interjections (ah), adjectives (genial), vocatives (oye), repetitions (genial. . . genial) and the use of emphatic elements (claro
que sí). In addition to these expressions, muy bien is used twice in the same intervention, as the most straightforward way of
expressing politeness and ‘praising’ I.
Conversely, in (2), although the polite meaning of the same expression might not be wholly rejected in an in-depth
analysis,6 it seems to be somewhat watered down in favor of other pragmatic functions, such as merely expressing the
speaker’s agreement with what the interlocutor has said in the previous turn. However, the meaning that appears in (2) is
only one of the various functions that muy bien can have in oral discourse in Castellón. In the following section we will
present some examples of this phrase being used for purposes such as metadiscursive structuring, self-correction, and
returning to topics or redirecting them. The fact that muy bien can have multiple functions in discourse raises the following
questions: (1) Can they be classified as units belonging to the category known as discourse markers? (2) Are such vernacular
meanings the product of a process of grammaticalization? (3) Are these different uses, which sometimes act at different
discursive levels (textual, attitudinal, interactional, cognitive), evidence of the marker’s multifunctionality? In other words,
are there several different muy bien discourse markers? Or, conversely, (4) can we argue that there is an original meaning
from which the others would be a natural derivation in different contexts? Before answering these questions, we will first
carefully review the functions that muy bien can perform in the oral discourse of Castellón (section 3).
Despite the growing body of knowledge on the subject, the notion of discourse marker is still not altogether clear and its
propositional boundaries do not always coincide in the work of different scholars (cf. Schiffrin, 1987, 2001; Blakemore, 1987;
Fraser, 1990, 1999; Redeker, 1990; Louwerse and Mitchell, 2003). In one of the more widely quoted definitions among
scholars in the Spanish-speaking world, Martín Zorraquino and Portolés (1999: 4057) characterize discourse markers as
follows:
‘Discourse markers’ are invariable linguistic units (that) have no syntactic function within the framework of the sentential
predication, which makes them marginal elements. They share a common purpose in discourse: that of guiding the
inferences that are realized in communication, in accordance with their different morphosyntactic, semantic and
pragmatic properties. (our translation)
If these formal, semantic and pragmatic characteristics are applied to the vernacular uses of our expression (muy bien),
they could easily be characterized as being typical of a discourse marker. In fact, Spanish linguists have already devoted a
good number of pages to discourse markers like bien, either alone or accompanied by other particles such as pues (pues bien)
(Portolés, 1989; Alarcos, 1992; Fuentes, 1993; Porroche, 1996; Garcés, 1996; De Fina, 1997; Iglesias, 2000) and to the
different functions they can have in discourse. However, to the best of our knowledge, very little has been said about the
6
It could also be argued that I seems to begin her new turn by ‘thanking’ or ‘congratulating’ her interlocutor for having ‘hit the nail on the head’, for having
helped her to construct her argument by providing new examples. See section 3.3 below for more details about these cases, in which attitudinal meanings
overlap with others that are purely interactional or metadiscursive.
nature of muy bien as a discourse marker, though a comparison between an example like the one in (2) and other more
canonical meanings and uses of muy bien in Spanish shows that the former has all the traits of a discourse marker. This is
supported by the fact that, in (2), it is impossible to formally intensify the expression:
(3)
*. . .muy, pero que muy bien, que todo eso, muchas vacaciones
(‘*. . .very, very well, and all that, a lot of holidays’)
whilst this is possible where muy bien has its conventional evaluative meaning:
(4)
Lo has hecho muy, pero que muy bien’’
(‘You’ve done it very, very well’)
Furthermore, muy bien in (2) does not have any syntactic function, in contrast to its conventional uses as an adverbial
complement:
(5)
Lo hiciste muy bien
(‘You did it very well’)
or as predicative:
(6)
Me parece muy bien
(‘Sounds like a very good idea to me’)
Finally, it should be noted that the communicative competence of speakers in Castellón enables them to resolve any
ambiguity regarding the function of muy bien in its vernacular usages. Thus, in addition to uses like those in (2), where the
presence of muy bien at the beginning of an intervention must be interpreted as a sign of confirmation, we also find other
metadiscursive or rectifying uses, as will be seen in section 3.
From a semantic point of view, it is often claimed that discourse markers do not affect the truth conditions of the
statements they accompany, and that they do not add anything to their propositional content. To put it another way,
discourse markers have a procedural meaning rather than a semantic one (Blakemore, 1987), since they provide instructions
about the way units of propositional meaning are to be treated. Nevertheless, it has been acknowledged that this procedural
meaning is not incompatible with the remains of the semantic meaning that it derives from (Portolés, 2004; Curcó, 2004);
and this is also the case for the discourse marker examined here, as shall be seen in section 4.
We will now proceed to a detailed analysis of the different discursive functions that muy bien can have in the oral discourse of
Castellón. First, we will distinguish between the uses that are linked more directly to its evaluative and polite meanings
(sections 3.1 and 3.2), which are shared with other Spanish varieties, and those in which procedural meanings prevail over
semantic ones. Among the latter, we will draw a further distinction between those that appear in reactive interventions
(sections 3.3 and 3.4) and those that are used in initiative turns (section 3.5). As we will see, the latter type represents the most
advanced stage in the process of pragmaticalization undergone by the expression in these vernacular varieties.
3. Discursive functions of muy bien
3.1. Muy bien as an evaluative expression
As a unit with full semantic meaning, the expression muy bien is used to make evaluations about the segment of discourse it
is affecting. The modal meaning of the adverb bien, complemented by the intensifier muy, is used by speakers to positively
reinforce their evaluation about either portions of the discourse or some aspect of the extralinguistic context. This becomes
clear in (7), where I expresses a positive evaluation of the atmosphere of comradeship and amusement that prevails in his
company:
(7)
E: Entonces tendréis buen ambiente
Eh? Sí, siempre hay alguno que otro quee lo colgaría no? (risas), peroo
? ?
I:
E: Bueno, pero eso hay en todos sitios (risas)
I: Pero no, yo creo que sí, yoo, yo estoy ahora con mis compañeros, estoy trabajando
E: Sí
I: yo creo que hay muy buen ambiente, yo me lo paso muy bien (MCSCS 275)
(‘E: So there’s a good atmosphere there

I: Eh? Yeah, well, there’s always someone you’d like to strangle, isn’t there? (laughs), but
E: Well, that happens everywhere (laughs)
I: But no, I think so, I. . . now I’m with my workmates, I’m working
E: Yes
I: I think there’s a very good atmosphere, I have a really good time’)
In this evaluative dimension the expression can be used, albeit sporadically, as a synonym for the adjectival phrase muy bueno/a,
as shown by the woman speaker in example (8), as she discusses the quality of the furniture she bought when she got married:
(8)
?
E: Te fuiste de viaje de novios?
I: Sí sí, me fui de viaje de novios
Dónde? (risas)
?
E:
! ! !
I: Uy! A Valencia! Y al pueblo de mi madre!
E: A casa de algún familiar
I: Sí, sí, fui, me fui, me fui a la- a casa de laa- de laa hermana de mi padre, que a mí me quería mucho/y bueno, primero/
no/eee nos casamos//eee eee me hicieron los muebles a la Vall d’Uixó/bonitos. . . unos muebles muy bien (MCSCS 417)
(‘E: Did you go on honeymoon?

I: Yes, yes, I went on honeymoon
E: Where? (laughs)
I: Oh! To Valencia! And to my mother’s village!
E: To stay at some relative’s place
I: Yeah, yeah, I, er, I went, er, I went to my to my father’s sister’s house, who was very fond of me/and well, first/no/and
we got married (waits) and I had the furniture made in Vall d’Uixó/nice. . . some very good furniture’)
In negative contexts, on the other hand, the same expression loses its intensifying function and now serves to mitigate
negative facts or opinions. The contrast between the two meanings can be observed by comparing the dialogue fragment in
(3) and the one below in (9), where the same speaker as before now talks about other, less positive aspects of his job as an
electrician, such as the vertigo he suffers every time he has to climb an electricity pylon. As might be expected, he is much
less keen on this new side of his job, but the negative evaluation he makes is mitigated in his intervention: instead of a blunt
‘‘I don’t like it at all’’, the speaker prefers to express his impressions in a milder way:
(9)
I: (. . .) tenemos que subirnos a las torres
E: Umm umm
I: No lo paso muy bien la verdad/no lo paso muy bien (MCSCS 275)
(‘I: (. . .) we have to climb the electricity pylons

E: Uh-huh
I: The truth is I’m not that keen on it really/not that keen on it’)
3.2. The use of muy bien for polite evaluations
The semantic meaning of muy bien explains why it is frequently used as a way of expressing politeness in Spanish. The
existence of a relation between certain Spanish discourse markers and coding for politeness by means of different
?
grammaticalization processes has been highlighted in studies by Chodorowska (1997), regarding the expression me
entiendes?; Schwenter (1995), for the reformulator o sea; Vann et al. (2002), for the marker no, sí. . .; and, García Vizcaíno and
Martínez Cabeza (2005) for bueno, to name just a few. In the case of muy bien, however, the fact that this expression
maintains its full canonical meaning makes it more difficult to interpret it as a true discourse marker.
In order to analyze the politeness effects of muy bien in verbal interactions, we can draw on Brown and Levinson’s (1987)
theory, based on Goffman’s concepts of face and territory. This theory is based on the idea that these psychosocial constructs
can be threatened in any instance of verbal interaction. According to Brown and Levinson, face can be either positive or
negative. Their definition of positive face is very similar to Goffman’s concept of face, roughly corresponding to the image that
participants create of themselves and which they display to those around them. Negative face is more akin to Goffman’s
concept of territory (Goffman, 1967), that is to say, the desire each of us has to see our own space left undisturbed and, as a
result, to avoid being forced to participate in potentially undesired actions.
As regards the factors determining the potential degree of threat to the interlocutors’ face, Brown and Levinson (1987)
establish a complex formula that includes the degree of social distance and the differences in power between the
participants, as well as the level of imposition involved in the communicative acts concerned. Although the implementation
of this formula may differ from one culture to another (Bravo, 1999; Bravo and Briz (eds.), 2004), certain verbal interactions
contain features that are intrinsically likely to imply a potential attack on the interlocutor’s face and territory.
In the case we are dealing with here, the distinctive features of the interview and the institutionalized role played by the
participants taking part in it can be seen as a threat to the negative face of the interviewee, or as Bravo (1999) puts it, to his/
her degree of autonomy. Indeed, his/her freedom to act is seriously restricted by the chain of questions imposed by the
interviewer, which the interviewee will feel obliged to answer (Zamora, 1988–1989; Haverkate, 1998). Nevertheless, it is not
unusual for the interviewee to reply using a polite expression, which cancels out or at least mitigates the face-threatening
context in which the interview is taking place. Thus, at the beginning (i.e. one of the most delicate moments) of the interview
that the following fragment is taken from, the interviewer explicitly states his wish to ask his informant a series of questions.
The informant’s possible answers may go no further than a mere expression of agreement (e.g. vale (‘okay’), venga (‘all right’),
de acuerdo (‘sure’). However, in the conversation from which excerpt (10) is taken, I decides to mitigate the situation with the
aid of a politeness formula, which shows that he willingly accepts the rules of the interview imposed by the interviewer:
(10)
E: Buenas tardes
I: Buenas tardes
E: Umm/vamos a tomarte unos minutitos de tu tiempo, ya sabemos que eres un estudiante de la universidad y
suponemos pues quee en vísperas de exámenes tendrás trabajo que hacer, pero, bueno, no te importa si nos
respondes a unas preguntas
I: no, no, seguro que no
E: Bueno, pues entonces vamos a empezar
I: Muy bien
E: Umm/vamos a ver, al ser un chico joven, como la mayoría de (. . .) (MCSCS 42)
(‘E: Good afternoon

I: Good afternoon
E: Er/we’re going to ask you for a few minutes of your time, we know that you’re a university student and we suppose
that, er, just before the exams start you must have a lot of work to do, but well, you don’t mind answering a
few questions
I: no, no, of course not
E: Well, so then let’s get started
I: Very well
E: Er/let me see, as a young man, like most (. . .)’)
Note how, paradoxically, it is the respondent, not the interviewer, who employs this conversational formula, in order to
mitigate the potential threat to his own negative face. The effect is that, on this occasion, the use of muy bien lessens the
interviewer’s responsibility for the threat to the interviewee’s face. Koike et al. (2001) apply the same interpretative paradigm in
order to explain certain uses of the expression no, sí. . . in question-answer adjacency pairs, in which one speaker is also seen to
recognize a possible threat to his/her own negative face in interview situations. However, unlike this mitigating formula, which
is used by the speaker REVISAR degree of their potential disagreement, muy bien has the opposite effect: its function is to
indicate that the interviewee accepts the rules imposed by the interviewer.
Nevertheless, the most common manifestations of this interactional function are linked with positive face, and they are
usually employed by the interviewers. In their wish to turn a potentially embarrassing situation into a friendly encounter, it
is not unusual for interviewers to make use of several politeness strategies throughout the interview, with the aim of
fostering the interviewee’s positive face. Some of the most common strategies in this context include speech acts expressing
gratitude, praising or agreeing with the informant’s responses, and generally exalting anything that reflects positively on the
informant. These communicative acts are positive in nature and they reinforce the interlocutor’s positive face. The following
exchanges provide a small sample of such display of politeness toward the interviewee:
(11)
E: Muy bien, Palmira. Esto es todo. Muchas gracias por tu tiempo. Te dejo que te veo ocupada (MCSCS 354)
(‘E: Very well, Palmira. That’s all. Thanks very much for your time. I won’t keep you any longer as I can see you’re busy)
(12)
E: (. . .) muchas gracias por colaborar conmigo y gracias porque lo has hecho muy bien.
I: Cuando tú quieras, hasta cuando quieras, estoy a tu servicio (MCSCS 301)
(E: (. . .) thanks very much for agreeing to help me and thank you because you did it very well
I: Whenever you want, see you again whenever you want, you can count on me)
(13)
E: (. . .) esa chaqueta te queda muy bien, es muy bonita
a qué sí! verdad? Me la he comprado en Zara, en rebajas (MCSCS 127)
! ?
I:
(E: (. . .) you look really good in that jacket, it’s really nice
I: It is, isn’t it? I bought it on sale at Zara’)
To sum up, then, the canonical meaning of the adverbial phrase muy bien allows it to be used as a conversational routine
that is suitable for expressing positive politeness. It enables the speaker to reduce the distance to his/her interlocutor, either
by praising the latter’s qualities, or by showing that s/he fully agrees with what the other participant is saying. Nonetheless,
full retention of this meaning in such friendly uses would not, in itself, allow us to classify it as a discourse marker, since one
of the fundamental characteristics of these units involves a degree of desemanticization in discourse (Martín Zorraquino and
Portolés, 1999: 4059–4062). Whilst some authors classify bien and muy bien as discourse markers when used evaluatively in
contexts such as interviews (Fuentes, 1993) or in the classroom environment (De Fina, 1997), according to our stricter
criteria, these units (which also have a semantic value) can only be incorporated into the paradigm of discourse markers if we
base our analysis on uses like those discussed in the following sections.
3.3. From politeness to discursive coherence
Unlike the meanings seen in section 3.2, which are widely employed in standard Spanish, the uses that we will discuss in
this section are subject to greater discursive and dialectal constraints. Moreover, a trait that is common to all of them is that
they represent a first step in the pragmaticalization process described in this paper. Following Watts (2003: 176), we see
pragmaticalization as a process that blurs the propositional content of a linguistic expression to the extent that it loses its
original meaning, instead taking on a procedural meaning as discourse marker in verbal interactions. During this process,
semantic and procedural meanings can coexist in certain contexts.
The simultaneous presence of interpersonal (politeness) and textual (metadiscursive) meanings in conversation is most
clearly visible in sequences in which the interviewer has to deal with topics that have been previously developed by the
informant. In these cases, the interviewer ‘acknowledges receipt’ of what the interviewee has said, while also expressing a
positive evaluation of his/her proposals, ideas, etc. This can be seen in the following dialogue fragment, where the
interviewer reacts to the topic introduced by the interviewee (‘‘a lo mejor me voy al extranjero. . .’’, ‘I might be going abroad,
too’), while also immediately justifying it and showing approval (‘‘muy bien, claro, siempre hay que tener expectativas. . .’’,
‘very well, sure. You should always, always have aspirations for the future’):
(14)
I: Y si no hubiera tenido tantos exámenes pues hubiera empezado en junio en el Aquarama. El año que viene a lo
mejor me lo pensaré, peroo/a lo mejor me voy al extranjero también
?
E: Muy bien, claro. Siempre, siempre hay que tener expectativas no? para ir mejorando
I: Claro, y en parte también por eso quería trabajar este verano, a ver si ahorro y al año que viene poder irme
(MCSCS 129)
(‘I: And if I hadn’t had so many exams, I would have started at Aquarama in June. Next year I’ll think about it, but/I
might be going abroad too
E: Very well, sure. You should always, always have aspirations for the future, shouldn’t you? in order to improve in life.
I: Right, and that’s also partly why I wanted to work this summer, to see if I can save up and be able go away next year’)
However, the polite meaning of the expression can be somewhat lost to other functions that are more closely related to
mere conversational coherence. This is what happens when muy bien is used to mark: (1) a change of topic or subtopic during
the course of a verbal interaction, or (2) a change in their orientation. In the first case the speaker considers that the subject s/
he was talking about up until then has come to an end and introduces a new one. For instance, in fragment (15) muy bien
precedes the counter-argumenative pero in introducing a new subtopic about the subject considered till then in
conversation:
(15)
I: (. . .) a mí coger todo el mes entero puess pues no me gusta, no, porque se se hace demasia(d)o largo y ya se ha acaba
(d)o el mes y prefiero dosificarlas/incluso he llega(d)o a partir (las vacaciones), una semana en agosto y luego coger
otra semana a finales
de [septiembre
E: [ya
I: Me gusta partir, tener- trabajar dos meses, a lo mejor tengo una semana libre y trabajar cuatro meses y tener dos
semanas, y montármelo así
?
E: Muy bien, pero eres de los quee, de los que disfrutan trabajando? (MCSCS 32)
(‘I: (. . .) I don’t really, don’t really like taking the whole month off, no, because it, it gets a bit long and that’s it your
month’s gone and I prefer to spread it out/I’ve even split (the holidays), one week in August and then another week off
at the end of [September
E: [yeah
I: I like to divide it up, to have- to work two months, I might have a week off and work four months and have two
weeks off, and arrange it like that.
E: Right, but are you one of those. . . one of those who enjoy working?’)
In the second case, i.e. where a speaker marks a change in orientation, the conversation still revolves around the subject
discussed up until that moment, but the speaker makes a contribution that is aimed at redirecting it. This occurs in example
(16), where the interviewer (E) gives a piece of personal information (‘‘muy bien, eso es lo que estoy estudiando yo ahora’’,
‘right, that’s what I’m studying now’), about the topic introduced by the interviewee (I) (i.e. the difficulties involved in
making the right choice about what to study at university). By so doing, E’s contribution leads them back to the subject of
university degrees, which I mentioned earlier, because both participants share an interest in a degree in humanities:
(16)
I: (. . .) y como nadie te asesoraba tampoco, pues cogías lo que cogían todos, entonces te meti- te metías en cosas que a
lo mejor no te gustaban/me hubiera gusta(d)o estudiar algo, pero en aquel momento no me lo planteé, algo de historia,
algo de geografía, algo de humanidades en general
E: muy bien, eso es lo que estoy estudiando yo ahora
es que eso es bonito, no? (. . .) (MCSCS 249)
?
I:
(‘I: (. . .) and as there was nobody to advise you, well, you chose what everyone else was choosing, then you end – you
ended up doing things you probably didn’t like/I would have liked to study something, but I didn’t think about it then,
something to do with history, about geography, about humanities in general
E: right, that’s what I’m studying now
I: that’s nice, isn’t it? (. . .)’)
These functions of muy bien, allowing participants to continue with the same thematic progression or to redirect topics, have
been reported for other discourse markers such as a ver (Montolío and Unamuno, 2001), bueno (Martín Zorraquino, 1994;
Bauhr, 1994; García Vizcaíno and Martínez Cabeza, 2005) and bien (Fuentes, 1993; Garcés, 1996; De Fina, 1997). Perhaps the
most important thing about REVISAR which Martín Zorraquino and Portolés (1999: 4197) include as examples of
conversational metadiscursive markers, is that they are used to ‘‘indicate the mere fact that the message has been received and,
indirectly, they mark a change in turn, the accumulation or processing of information, and the progression of the conversation
with a new topic’’ (our translation). These authors also point out that, unlike bueno, which has a wider range of expressive
meanings, the marker bien is more neutral and, in terms of interpersonal relations, less ‘friendly’. This is why the speaker who is
leading the conversation may prefer to use it to signal a sequential break (to open or close a conversation and to indicate
thematic transition). Thus, ‘‘bien is used by the interviewer or person carrying out the survey more often than bueno in many
interviews or surveys’’ (our italics and translation) (Martín Zorraquino and Portolés, 1999: 4197). Fuentes (1993: 215) also
highlights the ‘phatic’ value of bien to introduce new aspects or topics. Whilst she acknowledges that it does not commonly
perform this function in ordinary conversation, a number of such cases do occur in interviews. Likewise, De Fina (1997) has
described a similar function of bien in the context of classroom interactions, where it acts as a contextualization cue (Gumperz,
1992), marking the transition between different class activities or changes in the participants’ interactional frames.
Interestingly, this author also mentions some examples where muy bien serves this purpose, although there is a clear prevalence
of bien in the analyzed data (111 occurrences of bien versus only 47 instances of muy bien).
By contrast, in the speech of Castellón, this metadiscursive function of sequential rupture, or as a way to mark thematic
progression, is displayed to a far greater extent by muy bien than by bueno or bien. In the corpus, there are some examples of the
expression appearing as a pre-sequence to begin the interview (‘‘muy bien, vamos a hablar un poquito, vale’’, ‘okay, let’s have a
little chat, then’). Nevertheless, in its metadiscursive meaning, the uses of muy bien in which the expression appears simply as a
mere backchannel are even more characteristic of the local vernacular. In these cases, muy bien functions as a feedback signal by
means of which the interlocutor shows his/her interest in what the current speaker is saying, while at the same time allowing
him/her to continue speaking (Gallardo, 1998; Vázquez Veiga, 2003). Thus, in addition to the kinetic (nodding one’s head, etc.),
paralinguistic (umm, aha, etc.) and linguistic (sí, ya, claro. . .) elements that characterize this conversational function in Spanish,
in the speech varieties of Castellón muy bien also plays an important role in expressing this same meaning.
The isolated use of muy bien in a reactive turn serves as a conversational feedback signal, as can be seen in the following
fragment, in which the interviewer takes one minimal turn to show that she is following her interlocutor’s intervention, but
does not wish to say more:
(17)
I: (. . .) perdí muchos años, repetí dos cursos y me planté con unos años que estuve ya a punto de dejar de estudiar y sólo
hacía que suspender, malos rollos en casa, y era un jaleo/entonces luego decidí ya dejar de estudiar y ponerme a trabajar
E: Muy bien
eee por qué me puse a estudiar y no, y no me puse a trabajar? Pues la verdad, por la TABARRA! que te pegan tus
?
I:
padres (MCSCS 353)
(‘I: (. . .) I wasted many years, I had to repeat two years at school and I reached an age where I was about to give up
studying and all I did was fail, trouble at home, and it was all a big hassle, so then I decided to stop studying and
get a job
E: Very well
I: er, and why did I start studying and not, and didn’t start working? Well, to tell the truth, it’s because of your
parents’ nagging!’)
Nevertheless, it is not infrequent for the expression to appear accompanied by other backchanneling signals (ya, ah, pues,
claro, etc.), which reinforce the respective participant’s involvement in the interaction (De Fina, 1997: 344). The same can be
said of the intensifying strategy of repeating the expression: in addition to merely facilitating conversation, in these cases,
the speaker also adds an apparent agreement with what has been expressed by the interlocutor, as can be seen in the
example (18), which includes some of the backchanneling resources mentioned above. Here, the interviewee talks about the
way in which he prefers to organize his school vacation. In this context, the interviewer’s brief affiliative interruption seems
to show that she is interested in what the informant is saying, while at the same time signalling that she basically agrees with
him. It is not surprising, then, that the agreement is confirmed explicitly by E in her next turn:
(18)
I: (. . .) antes de los exámenes otra semanita de ahí para- o sea, estas dos semanas que hay después de Navidad hasta los
exámenes que no se diera clase, [por ejemplo.
E: [Ya, muy bien, muy bien
I: Para ya enlazar con los exámenes yy
E: Estaría bien la propuesta (MCSCS 539)
(‘I: (. . .) before exams start another week to- well those two weeks between Christmas and exams there shouldn’t be
classes, [for example
E: [Yes, all right, OK
I: So that it links up with exams and
E: That would be a good idea’)
The role played by muy bien when used with this metadiscursive meaning is especially prominent in narrative passages,
in which the participant who is listening to the story uses the marker for two fundamental purposes: (1) to signal to the
interlocutor that previous phases of the narration have been understood, while (2) implicitly ‘congratulating’ him/her for
being able to tell the story in a coherent, understandable way. In these cases, the ‘‘listening participant’’ frequently heralds
the appearance of such a discourse marker by repeating a thematic element from the ‘‘narrating participant’s’’ contribution.
This function of backing up the narrative occurs most frequently in interviews with elderly informants, in which certain
extralinguistic factors (the intergenerational gap between the participants or, in some cases, articulatory difficulties caused
by the interviewees’ age) may make it difficult to understand their stories. In such circumstances, it is not uncommon for
interviewers to adopt a somewhat paternalistic attitude toward the elderly interlocutors, using strategies aimed at making it
easier for them to tell their stories. The following fragment is an illustrative example of this:
(19)
I: (...) sí, antes de casarse, pero poquito y luego se [casaron
E: [en el pueblo
I: (...) se casaron allá en el pueblo mi padre y mi madre, y luego allí tuvieron a mi hermano mayor
E: En el pueblo, muy bien
I: Y allí, entonces (. . .) (MCSCS 417)
(‘I: (. . .) yes before they got married, but only for a while and then they [got married
E: [in the village
I: (. . .) they got married there in the village my father and my mother, and then they had my elder brother there
E: In the village, right
I: And there, later (. . .)’)
As can be seen, the interviewer briefly intervenes by means of an affiliative interruption (‘‘en el pueblo’’, ‘in the village’), in
order to obtain a detail about the story being told by a 78-year-old woman. This information is confirmed by the respondent
in her next turn (‘‘se casaron allí en el pueblo’’, ‘they got married there in the village’), and then firmly anchored by the
discourse marker in the interviewer’s next intervention (‘‘en el pueblo, muy bien’’, ‘in the village, right’).
3.4. Muy bien as a response marker
In reactive interventions, muy bien also frequently serves either as an affirmative response marker or to confirm what has
been stated by the interlocutor. In such cases, it is equivalent to adverbs such as sí (‘yes’), agreement phrases like eso es
(‘that’s it’), así es (‘that’s right’), expressions which are sometimes reinforced by muy bien as in (20) below, or which it simply
replaces, as in (21).
One thing that differentiates the uses of muy bien in these cases from those discussed in the previous section is the type of
participant that they are mainly used by.7 Thus, while the discourse marker used as a metadiscursive structuring resource is
almost exclusively employed by those acting as interviewers, either of the two participants may employ it in the way discussed
in this section, i.e. within a ‘question-answer’ adjacency pair, in which the second move (the answer) is introduced by muy bien.
In the Castellón corpus there are several contexts in which the expression appears as part of a response intervention. The
first involves the use of muy bien as an answer to a question. In (20) we can see an example of this type. Two girls (I and E) are
chatting and I, who has been talking about a boy in her last few turns, is trying to explain to her friend (E) who this boy is. As a
result, in this phase of the conversation there are a series of exploratory inquiries and short answers until E poses the key
question (‘‘ el que tenía la novia de los pendientes?’’, ‘the one who had the girlfriend with the earrings?’), which allows her to
?
conclusively identify the individual, something that is confirmed by I in her next turn (‘‘sí, muy bien, que la tuvo que dejar. . .’’,
‘yes, that’s right, the one he had to stop going out with. . .’):
(20)
I: (. . .) luego no sé, igual/no sé, igual hizo dos cosas raras. No tengo ni idea
?
E: Y tiene tu edad?
I: Sí, estudia Hostelería
El que tenía la novia de los pendientes?
?
E:
I: Sí, muy bien, que la tuvo que dejar porque su madre le dijo que una novia de doce pendientes en una oreja y no sé
cuántos a la otra, en esa casa no entra (MCSCS 296)
(‘I: (. . .) and then I don’t know, maybe/I don’t know, maybe he did a couple of things that were a bit weird. I have
no idea.
E: And is he your age?
I: Yeah, he studies Hotel Catering
E: The one who had the girlfriend with the earrings?
7
This type of imbalance, which is related to the asymmetrical representation of power in certain types of verbal interactions, has also been highlighted for
other discourse markers in Spanish, such as bien (De Fina, 1997) and a ver (Montolío and Unamuno, 2001) in the classroom environment.
I: Yes, that’s right, the one he had to stop going out with because his mum said she wasn’t having her son going out
with a girl that had twelve earrings in one ear and I don’t know how many in the other’)
I’s response, in which we find the affirmative adverb par excellence (sí) accompanied by muy bien, differs from other uses in
Spanish reported in the literature. For instance, Martín Zorraquino and Portolés (1999: 4164) point out that the deontic
modal marker bien admits modification with muy, providing the following dialogue, taken from a play by the Spanish
playwright Carlos Arniches (El amigo Melquiades), as an example:
MELQUIADES: Queréis que organicemos un concurso de baile por parejas, con premios? (. . .)
?
TODOS (Aplaudiendo): Sí, sí! Muy bien, muy bien!

! !
(‘MELQUIADES: Shall we hold a dancing contest, with prizes (. . .)?

ALL (clapping): Yes, yes! Very well, very well!’)
Note how, in this dialogue, the answer to the proposal put forward by the character called Melquiades (‘‘organizar un
concurso de baile con premios’’, ‘to hold a dancing contest, with prizes’) is not merely an affirmation, as it also conveys a high
degree of expressiveness. This is reflected by the repetition of the response formulae (‘‘ Sí, sí! Muy bien, muy bien!’’, ‘Yes,
! !
yes! Very well, very well!’) and by certain writing conventions, such as the use of exclamation marks and the stage directions
(clapping), which reveal the intense satisfaction with which the proposition is received. Nevertheless, in the case of (20),
taken from the Castellón corpus, I only confirms the reference to an individual whose identity the interlocutor has been
trying to establish in her previous speech turns.
However, muy bien is used even more frequently to mark this agreement in utterances that constitute an answer to a
?
previous question in which the characteristically final toneme is now restricted to an agreement marker, which is often no?.
By using this adverb, the speaker prompts the interlocutor to corroborate the information that has been requested in a
previous turn (Ortega, 1985; Moyer, 2000).
In (21), the speaker (I) defends the importance of accomplishing certain milestones in order to rise to the highest levels of
sports achievement, such as the widely celebrated promotion of a well-known football team from Castellón (Villarreal C.F.)
to the Spanish first division a few years ago, or when another Spanish team (Real Madrid) won their seventh European Cup.
The interviewer is trying to strengthen this argument by putting forward another example (the case of the former Valencia
?
player, Pedja Mijatović) and asks for the interlocutor’s agreement by means of a confirmatory no? Note how this agreement
is accepted by the interviewee in the next turn by using muy bien, which now acts as the only signal of an affirmative answer,
unlike the accumulation of several such units in (20):
(21)
I: entonces tú piénsalo, que cuando digan ‘‘ el equipo que subió a primera división!’’. . . como ara,
!
por ejemplo, ganó la séptima copa de Europa el Real Madrid, pues los que ganaron la primera,
los que ganaron la [primera
?
E: [Mijatović, por ejemplo, ya ha entra(d)o en la historia, no?
I: Muy bien. Y todos los que ganaron la primera copa hace treinta o cuarenta años. . . (MCSCS 23)
(‘I: so just think about it, when they say ‘‘the team that was promoted to the first division!’’. . . like,
for example, Real Madrid won the seventh European Cup, so those who won the first,
those who won [the first
E: [Mijatović, for instance, has gone down in history, hasn’t he?
I: Right. And all those who won the first cup thirty or forty years ago. . .’)
A third context in which we observe the presence of muy bien as a response marker is in interventions where one
participant helps the interlocutor to complete his/her turn when s/he is having problems that are potentially going to
encumber performance (memory failures, difficulties in maintaining the argumentative or narrative thread, and so forth). In
these situations, it is common for the interviewee to begin the next turn by agreeing with the information provided by the
interviewer in order to avoid stalling the conversation. In these contexts, muy bien implicitly also expresses gratitude for
providing this information. This is what happens in the following passage, where a teenager (I) is talking about what he
would like to study at college in the future, but suddenly he seems to have forgotten the name of one of his favorite degree
courses. Fortunately, the lapse is resolved by the girl he is talking to (‘‘E: ADEM’’), and the content is immediately confirmed
by I in his next turn (‘‘I: ADEM, ADEM, muy bien. . .’’):
(22)
I: Sí, sí, pero sobre todo/ya te digo, historia del arte es lo que máss, más me gusta/a lo mejor alguna carrera comoo como
podría ser/eee lo que era antes empresariales, que ahora creo que se llamaa (3’’)
E: ADEM
I: ADEM, ADEM, muy bien, administración y dirección de empresas, muy bien a (lo) mejor, algo de eso también
(MCSCS 324)
(‘I: Yes, yes, but above all/you know, art history is what I like, what I like most/perhaps a degree like maybe/er, what
used to be called Business Studies and now they call it (3’’)
E: BAM
I: BAM, BAM, right, business administration and management, right, maybe something like that as well’)
Lastly, a very similar use can be observed when the interviewer paraphrases the explicit words or the thoughts underlying
the interviewee’s interventions, thus helping to clarify his/her descriptions, reports, arguments etc., especially when s/he has
failed to express him/herself very clearly. If such paraphrasing ‘gets it right’, i.e. if it coincides with what the speaker really
wanted to say, then the agreement is newly introduced by muy bien.
3.5. The uses of muy bien in initiative turns
In contrast to the functions discussed above, in this section we will examine meanings of muy bien in initiative
speech turns. In sociolinguistic interviews, this is mainly – though not exclusively – found when an interviewee
describes scenes, narrates stories, asks for opinions, etc. From a dialectological perspective, these are probably the most
original uses of the expression, and they are one of the most identified and stereotypical of the oral varieties of
Castellón.
The metafunction shared by all uses of muy bien in initiative turns is to support the discursive activities (narration,
descriptions, argumentations, etc.) carried out by the speaker him/herself. Whilst there are many parallels to the agreement
function in reactive interventions discussed above, the difference is that, here, it is the speaker him/herself, rather than his/
her interlocutor, who solves his/her own communicative difficulties.
The discourse marker muy bien appears when the speaker has some problems carrying out his/her turn properly,
either because of a lapse of memory, confusion or doubts that arise while reasoning or narrating, loss of the connecting
thread, or because of the very complexity of the content that s/he is trying to communicate. In such contexts, this
discourse marker acts as a prelude to the effort the speaker will make to clarify what is meant. In this general
framework, muy bien performs some specific functions that we will now proceed to analyze, again drawing our
examples from the Castellón corpus.
The function of resuming a topic, for example, occurs in sections of discourse in which the interviewee has forgotten some
detail. This is what appears to be happening to a woman while narrating a personal episode from her past: she makes her slip
explicit by means of an interrogative sentence (‘‘a ver a dónde iba yo?’’, ‘let me see, where was I going?’), followed by a few
?
seconds’ pause. Finally, the speaker remembers what she had forgotten and introduces the new information with the help of
the interjection ah, followed by muy bien:
(23)
I: (. . .) y yo me iba por la esquina, bueno por donde está el Banco Atlántico, que bajaba//a ver a dónde iba yo? . . . (2 ss)
?
ah, muy bien, que iba- que había quedado yo con unas amigas en la plaza de La Paz para hacernos un café (. . .)
(MCSCS 126)
(‘I: (. . .) and I was just going round the corner, well where the Banco Atlántico is, I was going down//let me see, where
was I going? . . . (2 ss) oh right, I was going, I’d arranged to meet some friends in La Paz square to go for a coffee (. . .)’)
Such slips and lapses are not restricted to interviewees’ contributions to the dialogue, as shown by the example of a
similar memory failure on the part of the interviewer in (24). Here, the end of I’s turn catches E by surprise, and the latter has
to think for a moment before she remembers the next question she was going to ask her informant. Note, again, how the
retrieval of the connecting thread is preceded by paralinguistic and linguistic cues with the same function as in the previous
excerpt, i.e. lengthening of the end sounds (yyy), prolonged pause (//), affirmative adverb (sí) and discourse marker (muy
bien):
(24)
I: (. . .) pues yo pienso que que es una cosa muy importante para una persona enferma, inválida.
E: yyy //. . . ah, sí. . . muy bien, si crees en el poder de loss de los curanderos (MCSCS 372)
(‘I: (. . .) so I think that that it’s something very important for a sick, disabled person.
E: and ///. . . oh, yes. . . right, whether you believe in the powers of of faith-healers’)
The same cues accompany muy bien in other initiative turns. These uses can be included in the category of so-called
reformulator discourse markers (Blakemore, 1993; Cuenca, 2003; Portolés, 2004). As Portolés (2004: 290) states:
‘‘reformulators are discourse markers that present the utterance they appear in as a new formulation of what was previously
meant by another earlier utterance’’ (our translation). This category of discourse markers includes several types of
expressions, depending on the specific inferences they add to the verbal interaction. Here, we are particularly interested in
rephrasing reformulators, i.e. ‘‘those that replace a first utterance, which they present as an incorrect formulation, by another
one that corrects or at least improves it’’ (Portolés, 2004: 290, our translation). According to Portolés, the category of
rephrasing reformulators includes the adverbial expressions mejor dicho, más bien, and occasionally digo (Martín Zorraquino
and Portolés, 1999: 4128). Similarly, rectifying uses (in particular self-correcting uses, which are the ones we are interested
in here) have been observed for some conversational discourse markers like bueno or bien (Briz, 1993; Briz and Hidalgo,
1998).8
In the Castellón varieties of Spanish, this self-correcting function is often performed by the expression muy bien which
introduce a new statement that totally or partially modifies what the speaker has previously said. In addition to the pauses
and other expressions of hesitation that herald the use of this discourse marker, a negation marker must also be present in
these cases. The following dialogue fragment illustrates this: the interviewee begins his answer to the interviewer’s
question, but immediately realizes that he has made a mistake in the story (‘‘la primera vez que fuimos. . .’’, ‘the first time we
went. . .’), which he corrects right away. This correction is preceded by the negative adverb no as well as the self-correcting
discourse marker muy bien (‘‘no. . . muy bien, dos veces fuimos en tren. . .’’, ‘no. . . right, we went by train twice. . .’):
(25)
Y cómo ibas hasta. . .? o sea, cuando estabas en Alicante qué te ibas, en tren?
? ?
E:
I: La primera vez que fuimos//no . . . muy bien, dos veces fuimos en tren, y el resto ya fuimos en el coche de un compañero
(MCSCS 75)
(‘E: And how did you get to. . .? I mean, when you were in Alicante, how did you get there, by train?
I: The first time we went//no. . . right, we went by train twice, and the other times we went in a friend’s car’)
Nevertheless, the most common function performed by muy bien in initiative turns is that of a self-confirming marker.
What examples (23)–(25) have in common is that muy bien is employed after a moment of hesitation while the speaker is
resolving memory difficulties. Once these difficulties have been overcome, the speaker goes on to confirm what has been said
in the previous context, when s/he feels sure about it. This is what happens to the informant in (26) when talking about her
plans for the next summer:
(26)
I: (. . .) Yo estoy en agosto//muy bien, este agosto, sí, la primera quincena me voyy/eee, yo me he pedido mis vacaciones
todo agosto (MCSCS 216)
(‘I: (. . .) In August I’m//right, this August, yeah, during the first two weeks I’m going away/er, I’ve asked to have the
whole month of August off’)
Note, once again, the presence of the discourse elements that frequently accompany our discourse marker, such as the
contiguous pause (//), the appearance of the affirmative adverb (sí) or the reformulation strategy (en agosto. . . este agosto (‘in
August. . . this August’), all of which contribute to shaping this confirmatory function.
More sporadic, but nonetheless equally interesting, are the cases in which muy bien serves to anticipate the confirmation
of an idea that is being formed in the speaker’s mind, but which has not yet been made explicit. This function can often be
observed in argumentative passages, which involve a greater degree of cognitive effort for the speaker than narrative or
descriptive ones. In these sequences, it is not uncommon for the speaker to show signs of mental activity, revealing an effort
to sort out his/her ideas. These difficulties appear to justify the truncated, and apparently incoherent, structure employed by
this speaker in her answer to a particularly ‘tricky’ question posed by the interviewer in (27) (‘‘ qué opinas de la religión?’’,
?
‘what do you think about religion?’):
(27)
qué opinas sobre la religión?
?
E:
I: eee/por ejemplo, sí//muy bien, por ejemplo, Juan Ramón que es ateo practicante y militante // yo no lo tengo
muy claro, yo no es que sea/no soy creyente pero tampoco soy atea, ni tampoco me planteo (. . .) (MCSCS 257)
(‘E: What do you think about religion?
8
Nonetheless, the self-correcting use of bien is far less common than that of bueno (Martín Zorraquino and Portolés, 1999: 4198).
I: er/for example, yes//right, for example, Juan Ramón who is a practicing militant atheist // I’m not too sure about it,
I mean I’m not/I’m not one of the faithful but I’m not an atheist either, and I don’t think about it either (. . .)’)
Finally, muy bien can also be used as an information structuring device that is, to some extent, similar to its function
in the reactive interventions discussed in section 3.3. However, whilst its use in reactive interventions occurs mainly
when the interviewer provides feedback, changes the topic or redirects the conversation, the use discussed in this
section is found exclusively in interviewees’ contributions to the conversation, as they develop their stories, arguments,
etc.
In the literature, discourse markers that serve to regulate the organization of information within discourse are considered
to belong to the category of structural markers (Martín Zorraquino and Portolés, 1999: 4080; Portolés, 2004: 288). Within this
category, we are particularly interested in the so-called commentators, i.e. units that present the statement they introduce as
a new comment about something that has already been said earlier (Portolés, 2004: 288). Research on commentators in
Spanish includes detailed studies of the discourse marker pues (Portolés, 1989; Alarcos, 1992; Miche, 1994; Porroche, 1996;
Iglesias, 2000), the expressions así las cosas and dicho esto, as well as the core element of the discourse marker investigated in
this paper, the adverb bien (Fuentes, 1993; Garcés, 1996). Nevertheless, to our knowledge, the case of muy bien has, to date,
never been included in this list.
In the vernacular varieties of Spanish spoken in Castellón, however, the presence of this expression frequently appears in
sequences in which speakers must make a considerable effort to string their message together in a coherent manner. This is
why, in these cases, muy bien appears at a later point in the interlocutor’s turn, contrasting with the previous examples in this
section in which it occurs early on in the utterance. Moreover, muy bien is also commonly accompanied by other discursive
units with similar functions, such as pues, the commentator par excellence in colloquial Spanish, or other discourse markers of
a more argumentative nature (counter-argumentative connectors such as pero). With muy bien, the speaker formally
concludes the idea conveyed in his/her previous statement, while at the same time contrastively reinforcing the commenting
function of pues in (28) and the counter-argumentative function of pero in (29):
(28)
I: En el año 1000 también lo pensaban, que el mundo se iba a acabar, que tal y que cual/muy bien, pues eso fue en
el año 1000, ahora como llega el 2000 pues lo mismo pero qué pasa? que el problema es que el calendario Juliano
?
está mal hecho
(‘I: In the year 1000 they also thought so, that the world was going to end and what have you/right, so that was in the year
1000, now we’ve come to 2000 and the same thing again, but what’s happened? The problem is that the Julian calendar is
wrong’)
(29)
Bueno eso es otra historia, que en general no hacen ni caso, pero bueno/normalmente dan algo para contentar, que si suben
esto, que si tal y cual, que si bajan lo otro, muy bien, pero se benefician todos los trabajadores, eso significa que la siguiente
vez que se convoca una huelga y tal y cual, pues los que se han ido a la huelga, pues oye, dicen. . . (MCSCS 274)
(‘Well that’s another story, they don’t pay any attention, but well/normally they give something to keep people happy, they
put something up, and what have you, they cut something else, OK, but all workers benefit from it, which means that next
time there’s a general strike and the like, well those who went out on strike, you know, they say. . .’)
4. The process of pragmaticalization of muy bien
Following once again Martín Zorraquino and Portolés’s (1999: 4059 ff.) characterization of the properties of
discourse markers in Spanish, we can conclude that the expression muy bien has a twofold function, similar to that of
other units of the same type. In this respect, for instance, it is important to note the parallelism with bien, an adverb
which also carries out both discourse marker (‘‘Bien, lo haré’’, ‘Right, I’ll do it’) and non-discourse-marker functions (‘‘Lo
haré bien’’, ‘I’ll do it well’). In section 2, we reviewed some arguments in favor of viewing muy bien as a discourse marker
in many vernacular uses. These arguments are (1) the fact that it is impossible to formally intensify the expression
(‘‘*. . .muy, pero que muy bien, que todo eso, muchas vacaciones’’, ‘*very, very well, and all that, a lot of holidays’); and (2)
the absence of a true syntactic function when used as a discourse marker, as opposed to its conventional adverbial (‘‘lo
hiciste muy bien’’, ‘you did it very well’) and predicative uses (‘‘me parece muy bien’’, ‘sounds like a very good idea to me’).
Moreover, after a detailed examination of the multiple functions of muy bien in conversation, we have seen that it can
frequently have formal features that make it similar to other expressions with procedural meanings, such as the
following;9
9
Some of the examples discussed in previous sections will be repeated here for the purpose of illustration.
(a) Muy bien frequently precedes the statement it introduces. This is the case when it is used as a response marker (cf.
section 3.4), as in (20), and when it marks a change of topic (cf. section 3.3), as in (15):
(20)
?
E:
I: Sí, muy bien. . . (MCSCS 296)
(‘E: The one who had the girlfriend with the earrings?
I: Yes, that’s right’. . .)
(15)
I: me gusta partir, tener- trabajar dos meses, a lo mejor tengo una semana libre y trabajar cuatro meses y
tener dos semanas, y montármelo así
?
E: Muy bien, pero eres de los quee, de los que disfrutan trabajando? (MCSCS 32)
(‘I: I like to divide it up, to have- to work two months, I might have a week off and work four months and have two weeks
off, and arrange it like that.
E: Right, but are you one of those who enjoy working?’)
However, our corpus data show that this initial position is not obligatory. Muy bien can also occur at a later point in the
utterance when its function is to support the stories, arguments, etc. in initiative interventions (cf. section 3.5), as in (23):
(23)
I: (. . .) y yo me iba por la esquina, bueno por donde está el Banco Atlántico, que bajaba//a ver a dónde iba yo? . . .
?
(2 ss) ah, muy bien, que iba- que había quedado yo con unas amigas en la plaza de La Paz para hacernos un café (. . .)
(MCSCS 126)
(‘I: (. . .) and I was just going round the corner, well where the Banco Atlántico is, I was going down//let me see,
where was I going? . . . (2 ss) oh right, I was going, I’d arranged to meet some friends in the La Paz square to go for a
coffee (. . .)’)
(b) Just like other discourse markers, muy bien often appears between two pauses, usually preceded by a period of
hesitation, especially in initiative turns (cf. section 3.5), as in (25):
(25)
E: Y cómo ibas hasta. . .? o sea, cuando estabas en Alicante qué te ibas, en tren?
? ?
I: La primera vez que fuimos//no . . . muy bien, dos veces fuimos en tren, y el resto ya fuimos en el coche de un
compañero (MCSCS 75)
(‘E: And how did you get to...? I mean, when you were in Alicante, how did you get there – by train?
I: The first time we went//no. . . right, we went by train twice, and the other times we went in a friend’s car’)
(c) Again, like other discourse markers (ah, eh, pues, etc.), it can be repeated (muy bien. . . muy bien) in order to reinforce its
emphatic meaning.
(d) In similar vein it does not permit certain syntactic transformations, such as:
(1) coordination: comp. ‘‘Estamos muy bien y a gusto en esta casa’’, ‘We feel very well and at home in this house’; versus
‘‘I: A lo mejor me voy al extranjero. *E: muy bien y claro’’, ‘I: I may be going abroad. *E: Very well and sure’,
(2) negation: comp. ‘‘No estamos muy bien en casa’’, ‘We don’t feel very good at home’; versus ‘‘E: Vamos a empezar, *no
muy bien. . .’’, ‘E: Let’s get started, *not right...’,
(3) clefting: comp. ‘‘Muy bien fue como lo hizo’’, ‘It was very well how he did it’; versus ‘‘*Muy bien es como, Palmira, eso
es todo’’ ‘*Very well is how, Palmira, that’s all’,
(e) Regarding its degree of autonomy, muy bien is generally accompanied by other discourse elements, as in (20), but it can,
occasionally, also appear on its own, filling an entire turn. This occurs in cases where it functions as a conversational
feedback marker (cf. section 3.3), as in (17):
(20)
?
E:
I: Sí, muy bien, que la tuvo que dejar porque su madre le dijo que una novia de doce pendientes en una oreja y no sé
cuántos a la otra, en esa casa no entra (MCSCS 296)
(E: The one who had the girlfriend with the earrings?
I: Yes, that’s right, the one he had to stop going out with because his mum said she wasn’t having her son going out
with a girl that had twelve earrings in one ear and I don’t know how many in the other’)
(17)
I: (. . .) perdí muchos años, repetí dos cursos y me planté con unos años que estuve ya a punto de dejar de estudiar yy
sólo hacía que suspender, malos rollos en casa, y era un aleo/entonces luego decidí ya dejar de estudiar y ponerme
a trabajar.
E: Muy bien
I: eee por qué me puse a estudiar y no, y no me puse a trabajar? Pues la verdad, por la TABARRA! que te pegan tus
?
padres (MCSCS 353)
(‘I: (. . .) I wasted many years, I had to repeat two years at school and I reached an age where I was about to give up
studying and all I did was fail, trouble at home, and it was all a big hassle, so then I decided to stop studying and
get a job.
E: Very well
I: and why did I start studying and not, and not start work? Well, to tell the truth, it’s because of your parents’ nagging!’)
Furthermore, muy bien is a highly versatile and multifunctional discourse marker. In the previous sections, it has been
shown to function at distinct levels of discourse: (1) textual: as an information structuring device, signalling a change or
redirection of topic; (2) interactional: in affirmative answer turns; (3) cognitive: as a marker supporting speakers’ cognitive
activity in argumentative or narrative sequences; and (4) attitudinal: revealing the affective involvement of the
interlocutors in the joint construction of the verbal interaction. Nevertheless, it is not always easy to isolate or separate
these functions in discourse, since they frequently overlap and coincide, as in many other discourse markers (Jucker and
Ziv, 1998).
This leads us to the issue of the degree of grammaticalization of muy bien, and to the questions we posed in section 2,
concerning its meaning and the origin of its multifunctionality in oral discourse. In the case of muy bien, it seems clear that
the procedural meanings discussed above retain some traces of the semantic meaning from which they derive, as has been
seen in the case of other Spanish discourse markers (Schwenter, 1995; Chodorowska, 1997; Montolío and Unamuno, 2001;
Portolés, 2004; Curcó, 2004). These traces stem from the referential and attitudinal meanings of the expression that are
suitable for making positive judgments. The additional meanings and functions it has acquired, within specific discursive
contexts, are the result of a process of pragmaticalization.
Instead of extreme, canonical process of grammaticalization, in which lexical elements become morphosyntactic pieces of a
renewed grammatical system (Hopper et al., 1993), the development that we are analyzing here is, in a way, a movement in a
qualitative different direction. Watts (2003: 176) uses the concept of pragmaticalization to refer to the processes that involve the
blurring of the propositional content of linguistic expressions, to the extent that they no longer act as purely semantic elements,
but rather as discourse markers of procedural meaning in verbal interactions.
Applying this principle to the expression we are dealing with here, it could be said that the semantic evolution of muy bien
involves a process of ‘metaphorical extension’ (Heine et al., 1991; Sweetser, 1990) that facilitates the transfer from a specific
canonical referential meaning toward others that are more abstract and context-dependent. This process takes place along a
continuum that can be divided into several stages. The first stage still lies wholly within the domain of the semantic meaning
of the expression, and could be summarized as follows: if the modal meaning of the expression is suitable for a positive
evaluation of actions, events or states, it will also be suitable for exalting ideas, thoughts or facts, and, in general, everything
that is positively related to the interlocutor. This is why muy bien is commonly used in Spanish as a way to express politeness,
especially as a means of exalting the interlocutor’s positive face.
In a second step, if this formula serves to praise the interlocutor and the circumstances around him/her, why not do the
same with his/her discourse? As stated by Beeching (2005: 174) with regard to a similar evolution of a discourse marker in
French (quand même), the ubiquitous presence in ordinary discourse of considerations of politeness can play a fundamental
role in the process of pragmaticalization that leads to an increase in the number of meanings of a particular unit in the
language. The speaker can also ‘praise’ the interlocutor when s/he successfully tells stories about him/herself, reflects on
different subjects, or merely contributes to the joint development of the conversation (by providing new topics or redirecting
old ones, resolving ambiguities, etc.).
The process of pragmaticalization also facilitates the evolution that turns muy bien into an evaluative marker, with the
fundamental function of indicating approval or conformity, whereby the specific evaluative meaning depends on the
respective discourse context. In the clearest cases, the expression serves as an affirmative answer that is equivalent (and
therefore, an alternative) to other expressions (sí, así es. . .) with the same meaning in Spanish (cf. section 3.4). However,
going a step further, when the speaker wishes to change the subject or the direction the conversation is taking, s/he can also
use muy bien to accept what has been said up to that point, before introducing the desired changes (cf. section 3.3). Finally,
in instances of hesitation, the speaker can even acknowledge that his/her own ideas have been understood correctly,
which, if corrected or confirmed in later utterances, may, once again, be introduced by the discourse marker muy bien
(cf. section 3.5).
5. Final reflections
The main objective of this paper has been to outline the pragmaticalization process of the expression muy bien and to
analyze the different functions that it has acquired as a discourse marker. In this process, its functional range expands from
the way it is currently used in standard Spanish, i.e. as an evaluative or polite element, to other functions at a different level of
discourse analysis. We have shown how muy bien can be used as a discourse marker to support the activity carried out by the
speaker in argumentative or narrative interventions whilst in other cases its main function is to signal the affective involvement
of the participants in the joint construction of the verbal interaction. Yet, on other occasions, it can serve as an information
structuring cue, signaling a change of (sub)topic, or it can even fill the entire answer turn as a mere agreement marker.
The multifunctionality of muy bien in the vernacular Spanish of Castellón can be linked to the fact that we are dealing with
a contact variety in which instances of linguistic convergence are common. This convergent outcome is reflected in the case
we are dealing with here, given the frequent appearance of the discourse marker in Catalan conversation with the same
functions as those we have observed in Spanish, quite often in the same Spanish form (muy bien), instead of the
corresponding Catalan expression (molt bé). Note how in excerpt (30), taken from an interview that was held entirely in the
Valencian variety of Catalan spoken in Castellón, E uses muy bien with a twofold aim, similar to the case discussed in section
3.3. On the one hand, the expression is initially used by E to positively evaluate the answer given by the person being
interviewed. At the same time, muy bien serves as the prelude leading up to a change of subject in the question that follows:
(30)
E: No has tingut cap accident en cotxe ni t’has caigut de cap puesto?
I: Coses insignificants
E: Muy bien. I alguna vega(da)- te’n recordes d’alguna vega(da) que hages tingut molta vergonya?
(‘E: Haven’t you ever had a road accident or fallen off something?
I: Trivial little things
E: Right. And have you ever- can you remember a time when you were really embarrassed about something?’)
The dialogue fragment in (31) provides a new example of the use of muy bien as a response marker to affiliative
interruptions. The expression is used twice by I as a way to acknowledge and ‘thank’ the interviewer for the help received
while telling the story about an episode in his/her life. E, in turn, acknowledges receipt of the phases of the narration that
have already been processed, again using the same discourse marker, although this time in its Catalan form (molt bé):
(31)
I: (. . .) jo ere entonses jovenet, que no tenie més que... dotze, tretze anys/pero tinc una germana que ne... ne tenie
dèneu, i aquella, pos, ja va ana(r) a l’ almasén a tria(r) taronges, a... lo que li... manaren
E: Perquè com ere més gran...
I: Muy bien
E: . . .la van destina(r) a uns treballs més pesats
I: Muy bien. I mon pare, pos tam(b)é va treballa(r) allí i, claro, com ja entraven dos jornals- no eren molt grans, pos, ja
mos podíem aspavilar ja natros pa... pa podé(r) minja(r) lo que podíem.
E: Sí, sí.
I: De manjar no cap, pero per lo menos la panxa plena, que diuen
E: Molt bé
I: i... después, pos vam esta(r) un any allí. . .
(‘I: (. . .) I was quite young then, I wasn’t more than. . . twelve, thirteen years old/but I have a sister who was. . . was
nineteen, and she, well, she worked in the orange warehouse sorting oranges, and. . . whatever they told her to do
E: Because as she was older. . .
I: Right
E: . . . they made her do the harder work
I: Right. And my dad, well, he also worked there and, of course, with two wages coming in- that weren’t very big, well,
we had to keep our wits about us to be able to eat whatever we could
E: Yes, yes.
I: Nothing fancy to eat but at least you had a full belly, as they say
E: Right
I: and. . . then, well, we were there for a year. . .’)
Further studies are needed to determine the pathways this linguistic convergence takes, in order to understand
better its eventual contribution to the process of pragmaticalization outlined here. An examination of the pathway
could, for instance, begin with an analysis of the extent to which the Spanish expression is integrated within the Catalan
language. In this respect, our data shows that the degree of linguistic integration of this phrase is low, since it is often
realized in its full ‘Spanish’ form, without the slightest trace of phonological or grammatical adaptation to Catalan. From
this structural point of view, the muy bien marker could be initially considered an outcome of code-switching, but more
research is necessary in this respect, considering the widespread use of the expression among the Catalan speaking
community.
The role of language contact as a catalyst fostering processes of linguistic change is well known and has been widely
discussed in the literature. Similar cases of linguistic interference traits between two closely Romance languages like
Spanish and Catalan have already been described in the past (see Blas Arroyo, 2004, 2011; Sinner, 2004). Nevertheless,
in contrast to the most usual outcome described in the literature on linguistic convergence, where the standard variant
of a linguistic variable in a source language interferes with the realization of its equivalent in other language, the
process of pragmaticalization of muy bien analyzed in this study is driven by a different mechanism. As we have seen,
the vernacular expressions in both Spanish and Catalan involve meanings that are unknown, or much less common, in
other Spanish – and Catalan – varieties. Thus, the pragmaticalization of muy bien could be grouped together with other
contact features found in the vernacular grammar of both languages. These include the formal blending of some
grammatical categories like adverbials (‘‘esp. abajo, debajo; cat. abaix, debaix’’, ‘down’) and prepositional units (‘‘esp.
bajo; cat. baix’’, ‘under’), or the simplification of syntactic rules such as the high frequency of verb-object agreement in
impersonal haber/haver clauses in both languages in the whole Catalan-speaking area (Blas Arroyo, 2008, 2011).
Another task that remains to be undertaken is the analysis of the possible influence of social factors on the sociolinguistic
distribution of the muy bien marker. For the time being, suffice it to say that the author has observed the majority of
vernacular uses discussed in this paper across the whole social spectrum of the Castellón society. Nevertheless, we have seen
that, in some of its functions, muy bien typically appears in conversational turns of certain participants, depending on the
institutionalized role they play in conversation, whereas there are other functions that any of the interlocutors can use it
without restrictions.
To conclude, the analysis of the Castellón corpus has revealed that the phrase muy bien has expanded from its canonical
meaning, suitable for the evaluation of actions, thoughts or states, as well as the expression of politeness aimed at the
interlocutor, to a number of different discursive functions and meanings. For instance, it has been shown to act as a variant
for affirmative answers in reactive interventions or self-correction in initiative turns. It can also perform other
metadiscursive roles, such as that of introducing new topics or redirecting old ones. Rather than merely providing an
unconnected list of these functions, we have focused on the process of pragmaticalization that links them, forming the basis
for the multifunctionality of the phrase. We have shown that the specialized meanings that muy bien has acquired in the
speech varieties of Castellón are a consequence of a process of semantic blurring that draws it away from its original
evaluative and polite meanings and leads it toward more procedural and discursive ones.
References
Alarcos, Emilio, 1992. Pues. Gramma-Temas 1, 11–26.

Andersen, Elaine, Brizuela, Maquela, Beatrice, DuPuy, Gonnerman, Laura, 1999. Cross-linguistic evidence for the early acquisition of discourse markers as
register variables. Journal of Pragmatics 31 (10), 1339–1351.
Bauhr, Gerhard, 1994. Funciones discursivas de ‘bueno’ en español moderno. Lingüística Española Actual 16 (1), 79–124.
Beeching, Kate, 2005. Politeness-induced semantic change: the case of quand même. Language Variation and Change 17, 155–180.
Blakemore, Diane, 1993. The relevance of reformulations. Language and Literature 2 (2), 101–220.
Blakemore, Diane, 1987. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Blackwell, Oxford.
Blas Arroyo, José Luis, 2011. Spanish in contact with catalan. In: Díaz Campos, M. (Ed.), Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics. Blackwell, Oxford (in press).
Blas Arroyo, José Luis (coord.), 2009. Corpus Sociolingüístico de Castellón de la Plana y su área metropolitana. Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I,
Castelló.
Blas Arroyo, José Luis, 2008. Aspectos estructurales y sociolingüísticos de una variedad de contacto: el español de la Comunidad Valenciana. In: Blas Arroyo,
J.L., Casanova, M., Velando, M., Vellón, J. (Eds.), Discurso y Sociedad II. Nuevas contribuciones al estudio de la lengua en contexto social. Publicacions de
la Universitat Jaume I, Castelló, pp. 19–42.
Blas Arroyo, José Luis, 2004. El español actual en las comunidades del ámbito lingüístico catalán. In: Cano Aguilar, R. (Ed.), Historia de la Lengua Española,
vol. II. Ariel, Barcelona, pp. 1065–1086.
Blas Arroyo, José Luis, Boix, Genoveva, Gil, Enrique, Tejada, Pedro, 1992. Variedades del castellano en Castellón, Diputación de Castellón, Castellón.
Bravo, Diana, 1999. Imagen positiva vs. imagen negativa? Pragmática socio-cultural y componentes de face. Oralia 2, 155–184.
Bravo, Diana, Briz, Antonio, 2004. Pragmática sociocultural, estudios sobre el discurso de cortesía en español. Ariel, Barcelona.
Briz, Antonio, 1993. Los conectores pragmáticos en la conversación coloquial (II): su papel metadiscursivo. Español Actual 59, 39–56.
Briz, Antonio, Hidalgo, Antonio, 2008. Marcadores discursivos y prosodia, observaciones sobre su papel modalizador en el ámbito de la cortesía. In: Albelda,
M., Briz, A., Contreras, J., Hernández, N., Hidalgo, A. (Eds.), Actas del III Coloquio Internacional del Programa EDICE. Cortesía y conversación, de lo escrito a
lo oral, Universitat de València/University of Stockholm, València /Stockholm. (www.edice.org/descargas/3coloquioEDICE.pdf).
Briz, Antonio, Hidalgo, Antonio, 1998. Conectores pragmáticos y estructura de la conversación. In: Briz, A., Hidalgo, A. (Eds.), El español coloquial en la
conversación. Esbozo de pragmalingüística. Ariel, Barcelona.
Brody, Jill, 1995. Lending the ‘unborrowable’. Spanish discourse markers in indigenous American languages. In: Silva-Corvalán, C. (Ed.), Studies in Language
Contact and Bilingualism. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, pp. 132–148.
Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen, 1987. Politeness. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Chodorowska-Pilch, Marianna, 1999. On the polite use of vamos in peninsular Spanish. Pragmatics 9 (3), 343–355.
?
Chodorowska, Marianna, 1997. On the polite function of me entiendes? in Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics 28, 355–371.
Cortés Rodríguez, Luis, 1991. Sobre conectores, expletivos y muletillas en el español hablado. Librería Ágora, Málaga.
Cuenca, María José, 2003. Two ways to reformulate, a contrastive analysis of reformulation discourse markers. Journal of Pragmatics 35, 1069–1093.
Curcó, Carmen, 2004. Procedural constraints on context selection, siempre as a discourse marker. In: Márquez Reiter, R., Placencia, M.E. (Eds.), Current
Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 179–201.
De Fina, Anna, 1997. An analysis of Spanish bien as a marker of classroom management in teacher-student interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 28, 337–354.
Fraser, Bruce, 1999. What are discourse markers? Journal of Pragmatics 31, 931–952.
Fraser, Bruce, 1990. An approach to discourse markers. Journal of Pragmatics 14, 383–395.
Fuentes, Catalina, 1996. La sintaxis de los relacionantes supraoracionales. Arco/Libros, Madrid.
Fuentes, Catalina, 1993. Comportamiento discursivo de bueno, bien, pues bien. Estudios de Lingüística 9, 205–221.
Gallardo, Beatriz, 1998. Análisis conversacional y pragmática del receptor. Episteme, Valencia.
Garcés, María Pilar, 1996. Los marcadores discursivos en español. In: Gil, A., Schmitt, C. (Eds.), Kohäsion, Kohärenz, Modalität in Texten romanischer
Sprachen. Romanistischer Verlag, Bonn, pp. 125–147.
García Negroni, María, 2002. En todo caso, atenuação, polidez e evidencialidade. Letras de Hoje 37 (3), 73–92.
García Vizcaíno, María José, Martínez Cabeza, Miguel A., 2005. The pragmatics of well and bueno in English and Spanish. Intercultural Pragmatics 2 (1), 69–
92.
Goffman, Ervin, 1967. Interaction ritual: Essays on Face to Face Behaviour. Garden City, New York.
Gumperz, John, 1992. Contextualization revisited. In: Auer, P., Di Luzio, A. (Eds.), The Contextualization of Language. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 39–
53.
Haverkate, Henk, 1998. La entrevista periodística. Análisis discursivo e interaccional. Oralia 1, 27–45.
Heine, Bernd, Claudi, Ulrike, Hünnemeyer, Friederike, 1991. Grammaticalization. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Hill, Jane, Hill, Kenneth, 1986. Speaking Mexicano: Dynamics of Syncretic Language in Central Mexico. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
Hopper, Paul., Traugott, J., Elisabeth, C., 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Iglesias, Silvia, 2000. La evolución histórica de pues como marcador discursivo hasta el siglo XV. Boletín de la Real Academia Española 80, 209–307.
Jucker, Andreas, 1993. The discourse marker well: a relevance-theoretical account. Journal of Pragmatics 19, 435–452.
Jucker, Andreas, Ziv, Yael (Eds.), 1998. Discourse Markers, Descriptions and Theory. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Knott, Alistair, Sanders, Ted, 1998. The classification of coherence relations and their linguistic discourse markers. An exploration of two languages. Journal
of Pragmatics 30, 135–175.
Koike, Dale, Vann, Robert, Busquets, Joan., 2001. Spanish no, si: reactive moves to perceived face-threatening acts, part II. Journal of Pragmatics 33 (6), 879–
899.
Louwerse, Max M., Mitchell, Heather H., 2003. Toward a taxonomy of a set of discourse markers in dialogue, a theoretical and computational linguistic
account. Discourse Processes 35 (3), 243–281.
Madfes, Irene, 2004. Autonomía y afiliación: el rol de los marcadores conversacionales como ‘índices’ de género. In: Bravo, D., Briz, A. (Eds.), Pragmática
sociocultural: estudios sobre el discurso de cortesía en español. Ariel, Barcelona, pp. 323–340.
Maschler, Yael, 1994. Metalanguaging and discourse markers in bilingual conversation. Language in Society 23, 325–366.
Martín Zorraquino, María Antonia, 1994. Bueno como operador pragmático en el español actual. In: Garza Cuarón, B., Pascual Rodríguez, J.A., Alonso
González, A. (Eds.), II Encuentro de lingüistas de España y México. Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, pp. 403–412.
Martín Zorraquino, María Antonia, Montolío, Estrella (Eds.), 1998. Los marcadores discursivos. Teoría y Análisis, Arco/Libros, Madrid.
Martín Zorraquino, María Antonia, Portolés, José, 1999. Los marcadores del discurso. In: Bosque, I., Demonte, V. (Eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua
española. Espasa Calpe, Madrid, pp. 4051–4215.
Miche, Élisabeth, 1994. Description sémantico-pragmatique de la marque espagnole pues. Cahiers de Linguistique Française 15, 51–76.
Montolío, Estrella, Unamuno, Virginia, 2001. The discourse marker ‘a ver’ (Catalan, ‘a veure’) in teacher–student interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2),
193–208.
?
Moyer, Melissa, 2000. Negotiating agreement and disagreement in Spanish–English bilingual conversations with no? International Journal of Bilingualism
4 (4), 485–504.
Ortega, Joaquín, 1985. Los comprobativos. In: Montoya Martínez, J., Paredes Núñez, J. (Eds.), Estudios románicos dedicados al profesor Andrés Soria Ortega.
Universidad de Granada, Granada, pp. 239–255.
Pons, Salvador, 2008. Conectores y cortesía. In: Albelda, M., Briz, A., Contreras, J., Hernández, N., Hidalgo, A. (Eds.), Actas del III Coloquio Internacional del
Programa EDICE. Cortesía y conversación, de lo escrito a lo oral, Universitat de València/University of Stockholm, Valencia /Stockholm. (www.edice.org/
descargas/3coloquioEDICE.pdf).
Porroche, Margarita, 1996. Las llamadas conjunciones como elementos de conexión en el español conversacional, pues/pero. In: Kotschi, T., Oesterreicher,
W., Zimmermann, K. (Eds.), El español hablado y la cultura oral en España e Hispanoamérica. Iberoamericana, Madrid, pp. 72–94.
Portolés, José, 2004. Pragmática para hispanistas. Síntesis, Madrid.
Portolés, José, 1998. Marcadores del discurso. Ariel, Barcelona.
Portolés, José, 1989. El conector argumentativo ‘pues’. Dicenda 8, 117–132.
Redeker, Gisela, 1990. Ideational and pragmatic discourse markers of discourse structure. Journal of Pragmatics 14, 367–381.
Salmons, Joe, 1990. The bilingual discourse markings, Code-switching, borrowing, and convergence. Linguistics 28, 453–480.
Santos, Luis, 2003. Diccionario de partículas. Luso-Española de Ediciones, Salamanca.
Sankoff, Gilian, Thibault, Pierrette, Nagy, Naomi, Blondeau, Helene, Fonollosa, Marie-Odile, Gagnon, Lucie, 1997. Variation in the use of discourse markers in
a language contact situation. Language Variation and Change 9, 191–217.
Schwenter, Scott, 1995. Some reflections on o sea. A discourse marker in Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics 25, 855–874.
Schiffrin, Deborah, 2001. Discourse markers, language, meaning and context. In: Schiffrin, D., Tannen, D., Hamilton, H.E. (Eds.), The Handbook of Discourse
Analysis. Blackwell, Malden, MA, pp. 54–75.
Schiffrin, Deborah, 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Serrano, María José, 2001. The socio-communicative function of two discourse markers in Spanish. Estudios de Sociolingüística 2 (1), 101–122.
Serrano, María José, 1999. Bueno como marcador discursivo de inicio de turno y contraposición: estudio sociolingüístico. International Journal of the
Sociology of Language 140, 115–133.
Sinclair, John, Coulthard, Malcolm, 1975. Towards an Analysis of Discourse. The English Used by Teachers and Pupils. Longman, London.
Sinner, Carsten, 2004. El castellano de Cataluña. Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen.
Sinner, Carsten, Wesch, Andreas (Eds.), 2008. El castellano en las tierras de habla catalana. Iberoamericana/Vervuert, Madrid/Frankfurt.
Solomon, Julie, 1995. Local and global functions of a borrowed native pair of discourse markers in a Yucatan Mayan narrative. In: Ahlers, J., Wertheim, S.
(Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, February 17–20, General Session and Parasession on Historical Issues
in Sociolinguistics. University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 287–298.
Stewart, Miranda, 2005. El feedback pedagógico y la cortesía, sinceridad y discurso. In: Murillo Medrano, Jorge (Ed.), Actas del II Coloquio Internacional del
Programa EDICE. Actos de habla y cortesía en distintas variedades del español. Perspectivas teóricas y metodológicas. Universidad de Costa Rica/
Universidad de Estocolmo, Programa EDICE, San José/Estocolmo, pp. 419–434.
Sweetser, Eve, 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Taboada, Manuel, 2006. Discourse markers as signals, or not, of rhetorical relations. Journal of Pragmatics 38, 567–592.
Thibault, Pierret, Daveluy, Marie, 1989. Quelques traces du passage du temps dans le parler des Montréalais 1971–1984. Language Variation and Change 1,
19–46.
Torres, Lourdes, 2002. Bilingual discourse markers in Puerto Rican Spanish. Language in Society 31 (1), 65–83.
Travis, Catherine E., 2005. Discourse Markers in Colombian Spanish, A Study in Polysemy. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin.
Vann, Robert, Busquets, Joan, Koike, Dale, 2002. Spanish ‘No, Sí’, A Particle of Politeness. In: Gutiérrez-Rexach, J. (Ed.), From Words to Discourse: Trends in
Spanish Semantics and Pragmatics. Elsevier Science, Oxford, pp. 337–349.
Vázquez Veiga, Nancy, 2003. Marcadores discursivos de recepción. Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela.
Watts, Richard, 2003. Politeness. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Zamora, Elisa, 1988-89. Análisis interactivo de textos orales: la entrevista. Estudios de Lingüística 5, 217–235.
Zavala, Virginia, 2001. Borrowing Evidential Functions from Quechua. The Role of pues as a Discourse Marker in Andean Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics 33
(7), 999–1024.
José Luis Blas Arroyo is professor of Spanish linguistics at the Universitat Jaume I (Castellón, Spain), where he teaches Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics in the
Faculty of Arts. His main research areas are devoted to variationist and sociopragmatic topics (politeness, forms of address, political discourse, etc.) as well as to
bilingual matters related to Spanish in contact with other languages. He has published a number of different books (Sociolingüística del español, Las comunidades
de habla bilingües, Discurso y sociedad, among others) and many articles on these subjects. Since 1998, he leeds the ‘‘Sociolinguistics’’ research group and the
‘‘Sociolinguistic Laboratory’’ at the University Jaume I.

ARROYO, Blas de (2011) - From Politeness To Discourse Marking

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

ARROYO, Blas de (2011) - From Politeness To Discourse Marking

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 855–874

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

From politeness to discourse marking: The process of pragmaticalization

* Tel.: +34 964729625; fax: +34 964729261.

2. The use of muy bien as a vernacular element of oral discourse in Castellón

I: Así me saco un dinerillo

I: That way I can earn myself a bit of cash

3. Discursive functions of muy bien

3.1. Muy bien as an evaluative expression

(‘E: So there’s a good atmosphere there

(‘E: Did you go on honeymoon?

(‘I: (. . .) we have to climb the electricity pylons

3.2. The use of muy bien for polite evaluations

(‘E: Good afternoon

3.3. From politeness to discursive coherence

3.4. Muy bien as a response marker

TODOS (Aplaudiendo): Sí, sí! Muy bien, muy bien!

(‘MELQUIADES: Shall we hold a dancing contest, with prizes (. . .)?

3.5. The uses of muy bien in initiative turns

(‘E: What do you think about religion?

4. The process of pragmaticalization of muy bien

Alarcos, Emilio, 1992. Pues. Gramma-Temas 1, 11–26.

You might also like