El marcador discursivo por lo menos en el español de Buenos Aires: de la cantidad mínima a la atenuación

Abstract

Within the frame of the Prototyical-Cognitive Approach (Langacker, Lakoff, Hopper, amongst others), this paper presents an analysis of the discourse marker por lo menos in the Spanish of Buenos Aires. It is stated that por lo menos manifests a continuum of semantic and pragmatic values that go from concrete meanings (expressing minimum quantities) to more pragmatic ones (expressing attenuation), in which these meanings are related to each other through the attribute of [+imprecision], provided by preposition por. Based on these meanings, the discursive syntactic behavior that it manifests can be at least described. According to each context of use, it at least behaves as a reformulator or focalizer. No examples were found in the corpus that could associate the marker with a thematizer function (that is, a connector that introduces old information that does not persist in the following discourse). In terms of discourse functions, por lo menos behaves as a focus marker when it conveys a sense of quantity—since it introduces new information that persists on its right, without any presence of pause—while working as a reformulation marker when implemented as an attenuation strategy—since it introduces known information that persists and appears, generally, between pauses. To support the hypothesis, the paper analyzes examples selected from the preseea- Buenos Aires oral corpus.