“A lot of people came, good drinks, good music... in sum, it was great.” The discursive function of particle que in recapitulative utterances: the case of <vamos/vaya, que + verbal utterance> in peninsular conversational Spanish

Abstract

The discursive pattern has a recapitulative function in peninsular colloquial Spanish and presents a high frequency of use. In that schema, the marker vamos/vaya introduces the reformulative item (an utterance with conjugated verb) generally via the particle que, although its presence is not required. That particle has not been studied before in such discursive contexts, but it shows formal similarities with unstressed que-inital constructions, which have been treated in literature basically as a conjunction, as a connective marker or as a marker of modality (Garrido, 1999; Escandell, 1999; Súñer, 1999; Porroche, 2000; Pons, 2003). We conclude that modal function, together with topic-comment function, is the most important function of the particle que in these contexts. Likewise, the high degree of frequency and the formal solidarity that presents the co-occurrence of this kind of markers with the particle que points towards an interactional constructional account of this discursive pattern in line with authors like Ono and Thompson (1995), Linell (2006, 2009a, 2009b) or Gras (2011).