Youngspeak: Spanish vale and English okay 129
which ends with a comment on aspects that threaten the reliability of contrastive
corpus research, which in turn points to the need to collect more reliable compa-
rable corpora for contrastive research on spoken language.
- The pragmatic markers
Pragmatic markers are defined in line with Carter & McCarthy (2006: 208), who
describe them as “a class of items which operate outside the structural limits of the
clause and which encode speakers’ intentions and interpersonal meanings.” They
see ‘pragmatic marker’ as a superordinate term for all conversational functions,
interactional as well as interpersonal, including functions on the discourse level.
The development of vale and okay into pragmatic markers is a typical result of
what I prefer to call pragmaticalization rather than grammaticalization, consider-
ing that neither has developed from a less grammatical to a more grammatical
status, which is characteristic of grammaticalization; both have left the clause level
altogether and operate on the level above.
2.1 Vale
The form vale derives from the third person singular of the verb valer (‘be worth’).
According to Gramática Descriptiva de la Lengua Española (1999: 4169f ), it
- signifies either agreement (¡vale!) or disagreement (¡basta!),
- is very frequent in teenage language,
- is frequently censored.
Vale is said to be used in informal settings and primarily as a reactive device to
express ‘acceptance’, ‘admission’ or ‘approbation’ of what has been said (Martín
Zorraquino & Portolès Lázaro 1999; Serrano 2002; Cestero Mancera & Moreno
Fernández 2008).
But vale is also used as a directive device. This happens when it occurs at the
end of an utterance, as a kind of ‘question tag’, where it appeals to the addressee
for a reaction (A: luego vas a roer vale (‘now you’re going to worry, aren’t you’) – B:
vale (‘okay’). In this function it is a frequent substitute for sí (‘yes’).
Sometimes vale indicates a reaction to the ongoing conversation and marks a
‘shift’ of direction (‘reorientation’) and it may be used as a ‘turn-yielder’ and con-
versational ‘closer’ (cf. Casamiglia & Tusón 1999; Cestero Mancera 2005; Moreno
Fernández 2005; Cestero Mancera & Moreno Fernández 2008). In other words,
vale functions on the discourse level as well as on the interactional and interper-
sonal levels.