The socio-communicative function of two discourse markers in Spanish

Résumé

In this article I present an analysis of the discourse markers la verdad -'the truth'- and pues -'well'- in everyday Spanish conversation from a corpus of 32 native speakers selected by random sample from the metropolitan area of Madrid (Spain). Results show that these markers convey coordinative properties during conversation as well as social and expressive meaning. My research indicates that sex is the most salient group factor which may be related to assertiveness and to the expression of causality-opposition in coherence and negotiating options. It is also worth of being remarked that gender is correlated with sociocultural levels (the lower to la verdad and the higher to pues) suggesting that men and women differ in their socio-communicative behaviour and that this would be due to both the social structure of the speech community and the parameters of linguistic interaction