ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critical review of recent studies of Spanish discourse markers (DMs). The first section evaluates the impact of studies of DMs on the development of pragmatics. Section 2 reviews existing research, including a historical survey of references to DMs in descriptive grammars in conjunction with the history of Spanish, followed by general issues related to the description of DMs, such as terminology, the characterization of DMs as a functional word class, some remarks about procedural meaning, and the role of prosody in the description of DMs. Section 3 examines methodological considerations; specifically, a function-over-form perspective of DMs and a variationist view. Section 4 suggests some future directions in the field, particularly the study of DM combinations and contrastive studies.
