ABSTRACT
In the realm of pragmatics and discourse-related phenomena, research on Spanish as a heritage language is still in the developing stage, and, as a whole, remains somewhat unfocused and inconsistent. This chapter attempts to synthesize a relatively disparate body of literature in a systematic fashion by applying a distinction that has been widely utilized in pragmatics. Pragmatic features are often categorized according to two different perspectives designated as pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic. The topic of discourse markers (DM) could serve as a prototypical case of what would be considered more pragmalinguistic in nature, further toward the linguistic side of the spectrum, although an analysis of their usage can also take into account sociopragmatic factors. DMs are single or multi-word units that fulfill one or more language functions in a given context, at least one of which is more procedural in nature, meaning that it conveys information about how an utterance is to be interpreted.
