Catherine E. Travis, Discourse markers in Colombian Spanish: A study in polysemy

Abstract

Catherine E. Travis, Discourse markers in Colombian Spanish: A study in polysemy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. Pp. x, 327. Hb US$128.00.

Pragmatics, the study of language use in context, has largely been positioned as an autonomous branch of linguistics that has little or nothing to do with semantics. However, it seems counterintuitive to me to attempt to understand language use without at the same time trying to understand what it means. Catherine Travis's publication is in this sense an important piece of work; it showcases how language use may be more fruitfully studied through focusing on language meaning. The aim of Travis's book is to identify the “conversational conditions” under which a set of discourse markers is used in Colombian Spanish, and, on the basis of those “conversational conditions,” to “determine and explicate the meanings of these markers” (2). In particular, it attempts to “demonstrate that the pragmatics of use of the discourse markers under consideration is semantically driven: the use of discourse markers is determined by their inherent meanings, which interacts with context-driven features to give rise to different pragmatic functions” (2).