Mexican güey – from vocative to discourse marker: a case of grammaticalization?

Abstract

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.

Monitoring 21st-Century Real-Time Language Change in Spanish Youth Speech

“…Their extra-predicative status explains why vocatives display a high degree of distributional freedom, operating in the left or right periphery of an utterance, in the middle of an utterance, or even independently (Kleinknecht 2013). As regards the linguistic expressions susceptible to assume vocative functions, four main lexical categories can be distinguished in Spanish: (1) proper names (e.g., Martín); (2) titles (e.g., señor 'sir'); (3) nominal terms of address (e.g., guapa 'pretty one'); and (4) second-person pronouns (e.g., tú 'you') (Kleinknecht 2013). Interestingly, in spoken Spanish, the category of nominal terms of address is used most frequently (Brandimonte 2011).…”

“…Interestingly, in spoken Spanish, the category of nominal terms of address is used most frequently (Brandimonte 2011). Looking at the semantic-pragmatic features of these vocative expressions, we can distinguish the following types: (1) vocatives denoting a certain property of the listener (e.g., age: joven 'youngster'; profession: profe 'teacher'; gender: hombre/mujer 'man/woman'); (2) vocatives describing a relationship between the interlocutors: (a) the so-called familiarizers expressing solidarity and trust (e.g., tronco/a 'dude'; tío/a 'dude'); (b) terms of endearment expressing an intimate, affective relationship (e.g., cariño 'darling'; amor 'love'); (c) kinship terms (e.g., mamá/papá 'mum/dad'); and (d) other types of relationships (e.g., vecino 'neighbor') (Braun 1988;Kleinknecht 2013).…”

La forma de tratamiento nominal huevón en Iquique (Chile): análisis empírico de conversaciones cotidianas informales

“…Además, los estudios de dude (Kiesling, 2004), hombre y home (Cuenca y Torres, 2008), mate (Rendle-Short, 2009) y guëy (Kleinknecht, 2013) muestran tendencias muy parecidas. Esta recurrencia hace surgir varias preguntas.…”

“…También estilísticamente "se ha ido desplazando desde la lengua popular hacia la lengua común" (Sáez-Godoy, 1983: 147), prevaleciendo en situaciones informales y de mucha confianza entre interlocutores (Rojas, 2012: 157). Un fenómeno similar se observa en otras variedades del español y en otras lenguas, entre otros hombre en español y home en catalán en España (Cuenca y Torres, 2008), güey en México (Kleinknecht, 2013), mate en Australia (Rendle-Short, 2009) y dude en Estados Unidos (Kiesling, 2004).…”

«Hola, guapa, ¿cómo estás?»: usos vocativos del adjetivo de belleza guapo en el español peninsular contemporáneo

“…INTRODUCCIÓN En una interacción verbal, no son infrecuentes las expresiones mediante las cuales los hablantes se dirigen directamente al interlocutor. A estas expresiones nos referimos con el término vocativo (Leech 1999;Cuenca 2004;Kleinknecht 2013). En castellano, como en la mayoría de las lenguas modernas, varias categorías léxicas son susceptibles de funcionar como vocativo.…”