Today's Mexican Spanish is marked by the frequent use of the word güey, which may assume a broad variety of functions: noun, adjective, invective, solidarity marker and discourse marker. This paper traces the development from the noun to the discourse marker, with intermediate stages being ritual insult and expressivity marking. The development is explained in several steps: a process of semantic-pragmatic bleaching from the invective use of güey to its use as a solidarity marker, then a shift of the vocative's attention-getting function from the interpersonal to the discourse level, and finally, a communicative overuse of the expressive function leading to its reanalysis as a discourse structuring element. The original semantics are preserved only insofar as güey is used exclusively within a relationship of solidarity between the collocutors. Finally it will be argued that the development of güey is not an instance of grammaticalization, although there are many similarities: the term routinization is proposed as a hyperonym.

This paper considers familiarizers, a special class of vocatives denoting solidarity and intimacy, as possible sources for pragmatic markers and discourse markers. We argue that affectivity plays a crucial role in the use of vocatives in general and especially in this functional development. More precisely, terms of address have the potential to intensify the affectivity displayed by the speaker. In this quality, they may be employed as linguistic strategies to enhance the expressive and illocutionary force of utterances. These expressive uses may be the source of several more peculiar functions related to turn and information management. While this holds for familiarizers as well as for vocatives in general, not interferring with the deictic force of addressing contained in the vocative form, in several languages there are familiarizers which undergo an inflationary use and end up as mere elements of discourse marking, emphasizing and delimiting sequential units such as turns, utterances, and intonation units. The deictic reference to the collocutor is virtually lost, which is shown by the typical fossilization of the masculine singular form in the newly derived functions. We illustrate this development with vocative-based markers in different languages with special focus on the familiarizers güey in Mexican Spanish and alter in German. Although their sociopragmatic indexicalities are far from identical, this comparative approach reveals some interesting similarities. In our view, a definition as ‘pragmatic markers’ is justified for vocative-based markers at any point of their evolution, while the term ‘discourse marker’ should be restricted to functions that are no longer directly inferable from the vocative’s deictic and expressive qualities.