"Mira, bueno, no es una maravilla⋯ vaya, no está mal; vamos, que está bien". La categorización de las llamadas "interjecciones discursivas"

Abstract

One of the main problems raised by the study of so-called interjective markers or discursive interjections is their highly polyfunctional character. The functional variation of elements as Spanish bueno, oye, mira, venga, vamos o vaya, mainly due to a process of semantic-functional extension, involves changes in the way they signify and operate which typically alter their morphological, prosodic and structural properties, thus significantly hampering their categorial, functional and semantic characterization. In this paper, we apply a dynamic model of categorization to two of these dicursive elements, vamos and vaya, to show that these discursive units have formal, semantic and pragmatic-discursive features that allow to draw (i) two well-defined and easily recognizable grammatical-functional areas, viz., the connective and the interjective one, related to two separate areas: the metadiscursive or textual one, and modal or interactive one; and (ii) a border area in which formal and functional characteristics of the textual and of the modal domains intersect, yielding a use of these elements as illocutionary reinforcement operators.