Spanish bueno in metadiscursive contexts: A constructional-pragmatic analysis

This study examines the Spanish discourse marker (DM) bueno through a constructional-pragmatic approach that challenges traditional lexicocentric analyzes. Its aim is to prove that analyzing the pragmatic-discursive values of this DM as emerging from its participation in certain discourse patterns (DPs) enhances previous descriptions. Building on recent theoretical developments from Hispanic linguistics as well as from research on other languages that warn against lexicocentric semasiological approaches, the study adopts an onomasiological and constructional perspective that advocates for integrated characterizations that capture DMs’ functioning within larger DPs. Through analysis of the Val.Es.Co. corpus of colloquial Spanish conversation (Briz & Grupo Val.Es.Co. 2002), we identify and formalize metadiscursive DPs involving bueno . These include prototypical metadiscursive functions such as topic resumption, topic shift, reformulation, and online planning support, as well as turn-taking and other functions characteristic of turn-initial position in both initiating and, especially, reactive turns, all of which are understood as metadiscursive. Our findings demonstrate that the diverse functional values traditionally attributed exclusively to bueno actually derive from the complete pragmatic-discursive patterns in which this DM participates. Formalized DPs offer practical applications for monolingual and crosslinguistic description, historical reconstruction of grammaticalization pathways, and applied domains such as L2 teaching and machine translation. Theoretically, our results show that the DPs approach resolves persistent contradictions in the literature, where researchers infer DMs’ values from co-text while simultaneously abstracting from that same co-text in their descriptions. In doing so, the study contributes to ongoing debates about constructions beyond sentential level by bridging Construction Grammar frameworks with discourse analysis.