In many languages, one can find pragmatic markers (PM) and discourse markers (DM) that originate from vocatives, i.e. nominal expressions used as direct, free address forms. Cases in point are the words mate, man, dude in English (Heyd 2013, Kiesling 2004, Rendle-Short 2010), alter, mann in German (Heyd 2013, Souza 2013), hombre/mujer, tío/tía, huevón, güey, ca‘/cabrón (Gaviño Rodríguez 2011, Helincks 2013, Palacios 2002, Rojas 2012, Kleinknecht 2013) in several varieties of Spanish. All those expressions have in common that in the majority of their ocurrences in everyday interaction they cannot be analyzed as vocatives anymore. While vocatives can assume different functions in discourse (relational functions, attention getting functions, emphatic and expressive functions), they always directly refer to the hearer. In contrast, the markers in question have lost that deictic second-person reference, and only function as relational, emphatic/expressive or discourse structuring elements.
The aim of my contribution is to analyze how and why this development occurs. I will concentrate on one of the words mentioned above, namely Mexican Spanish güey, while constantly referring and comparing to other, similar expressions. While güey was originally an imprecation (buey ‘ox’), it was generalized as a ‘ritual insult’ (Labov 1972) in the speech of adolescent males in the 1980/90s, and consequently adopted as a marker of emphasis or expressivity by a wide range of the population. Nowadays, though, this expressive function has been ‘bleached’ through inflational overuse, and most of the ocurrences of güey have no other than a discourse marking function, delimiting turns or parts of an utterance. We can, therefore, observe a process of semantic bleaching during which the former insult loses first its imprecative meaning and then also the acceptation of ‘fellow male’, being used by female as well as by male speakers, while at the same time reducing and changing its functional range from interactional/relational to text-relevant functions.
It will be shown that the outcomes of this process can be characterized as pragmatic and discourse markers. Still, the main focus lies on the question why vocatives qualify as a source category for PM/DM. It will be argued that there are some inherent qualities to vocatives that are preserved throughout the whole process and that can also be found in other possible source categories, e.g. imperatives (Reisigl 1999).