Estudio sociolinguistico de los marcadores como, entonces y tu sabes en el habla de bilingues estadounidenses

The main objective of this dissertation was to asses the impact of English in the Spanish spoken by young Spanish bilingual speakers with regard to the use of the Spanish discourse markers como (like), tu sabes (you know) and entonces (so). The sociolinguistic variables of gender, Spanish language competence, generational adscription, and socioeconomic status were taken into account. The data stem from 56 semi-formal interviews with Spanish heritage language students at the University of Florida. All occurrences of Spanish and English discourse markers were codified according to their pragmatic and discursive functions to later correlate those functions with the sociolinguistic variables mentioned above.;I first argue that the use of Spanish discourse markers is constrained by the speaker's Spanish language competence. Second, I propose that transfer from English to Spanish occurs at the semantic-pragmatic level. And third, the social variables influence the occurrences of the Spanish and English discourse markers in bilingual speech.;The results revealed that the impact of English does not occur only at the semantic-pragmatic level but also at the grammatical level. While English and Spanish discourse markers share some of pragmatic functions, the function of like as quotative and linking device is transferred to the Spanish discourse marker como. However, the most significant result is that the transfer of the function of like as linking device onto como breaches the Spanish syntactic norms, by which bilingual speakers omit the complementizer que (that) when using como as exemplification.;With respect to the social variables, the most significant one is participants' Spanish level of competence. The general results indicate that bilingual speakers tend to use more Spanish discourse markers and fewer English discourse markers, in contrast to those least proficient Spanish speakers. At the individual level, the results indicate that the use of discourse markers, both Spanish and English, is very idiosyncratic in bilingual speech.