Adaptive Management in Discourse: The case of involvement discourse markers in English and Spanish conversations

Abstract

This article describes the process of adaptive management in discourse as the main tool used by speakers to reformulate ideas in speech, mainly via discourse markers. Discourse markers, therefore, present themselves as elements that by their operative or involvement specificity serve to reshape the cognitive stance of the speaker-listener in a given context. This capacity is especially important to be understood and fostered in the case of non-native learners of a language, as they need to master the pragmatic aspects of a new language and not only its syntactic and semantic components. The article will delve into the comparison of involvement markers in English and Spanish to determine the functional differences in both languages. The results show the prag- matic asymmetry in the use of discourse markers in English and Spanish, a fact that indicates the importance of invigorating this research for the benefit of contrastive and pedagogic studies.