Maria Barrio

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

The multifunctional “and”: logical, discursive and expressive functions through paratactic extension in Spanish EFL compositions

This paper investigates the expression of paratactic extension in a written corpus of Spanish students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at secondary school and university level. More specifically, it describes the different functions of the high frequently used marker “and”. Firstly, a corpus-driven analysis reveals that and is a multifunctional marker for clause chaining in these texts, with logical, discursive, and expressive roles. This broad semantic scope of and has been acknowledged in the literature (e.g. Beaman 1984; Biber 1988; Biber et al. 1999; Brown and Yule 1983; Chafe 1982), especially in its use in spoken discourse as (1) vague discourse linker and (2) introductor of comments or evaluation on behalf of the speaker. Secondly, a quantitative account of the different facets of and in our corpus points at typical patterns of orality in the EFL texts, revealed through the frequent use of and with discourse-expressive functions. Nevertheless, the data unveil the existence of a possible developmental path in the use of and from secondary school to university level students toward less typically oral patterns.

References:

Beaman, K. 1984. “Coordination and Subordination Revisited: Syntactic Complexity in Spoken and Written Narrative Discourse”. Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. Ed. D. Tannen. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corporation. 45-80.

Biber, D. 1988. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad, E. Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, Essex: Longman.

Brown, G. y G. Yule. 1983/1989. Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chafe, W. L. 1982/1993. “Integration and Involvement in Speaking, Writing, and Oral Literature”. Spoken and Written Language. Exploring Orality and Literacy. Ed. D. Tannen. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex. 35-53