General extender use in spoken Peninsular Spanish: Metapragmatic awareness and pedagogical implications

Abstract

This article examines vague lexical features in unplanned, naturally occurring spoken discourse among speakers of Peninsular Spanish. It focuses on vague multi-word expressions that are part of a larger category of General Extenders (GEs, Overstreet 1999). Drawing on a subset of data from the Corpus Oral de Referencia del Español Contemporáneo (COREC), the article describes GEs in terms of form and frequency, and illustrates the use of the three most frequent GEs vis-à-vis discursive and pragmatic functions in spoken discourse. Based on GEs’ many and pivotal interactional functions as well as their frequency in attested interactions, this article proposes that language learners’ metapragmatic awareness of GE use in L2 Spanish be promoted through corpus-informed instruction.