Discourse Markers in the Communicative Processing of a Sixteenth-Century Document from Jujuy

Abstract

This paper focuses on a dowry deed drawn up in San Salvador de Jujuy in 1596. The event documented in this notarial deed takes place within an economically important family, whose members owned several lands granted by the dominant Spanish authority. The family has the particularity of being composed of parents belonging to two different ethnic groups: the Indigenous one, represented by the ruler of an Aymara people, and the Spanish one, represented by his wife. A third member is their mestiza daughter, legitimate daughter of the married couple granting the dowry, as was customary at the time.

We are dealing with a written text of a legal nature and official-administrative character, whose special language is manifested in simple and complex lexical units, including formulaic phrases, typical of texts from that period.

The document is not organized into paragraphs; there are no punctuation marks to guide the search for meaning; and sentence construction is anomalous, since the logical relations among the structures that compose them are not respected. Nevertheless, discourse markers guide and order the inferences needed to construct the semantic fabric of the text.

This paper focuses on the analysis of discourse markers in the document, such as por ende, la cual, por tanto, asimismo, among others, in order to show that they are capable of organizing the statements of discourse through their semantic-pragmatic values, and that their connective function lies in the linking role they play between utterances and enunciation.