9. Style variation in Spanish as a heritage language

Abstract

This paper examines the style and register variation in heritage language speakers of Spanish at the college level, specifically, the use of discourse markers across situations. Of particular interest in this study is the analysis of the marker como ‘like’, which seems to be spreading in the same way as the marker like in American English (Sankoff et al. 1997), adopting some of its functions that como has never been previously reported to have in the Spanish literature. The results of this study show that the choice of discourse markers, their distribution, and relative frequency varies across registers. This indicates that bilinguals understand the difference among registers in their non-dominant language and the fact that academic language is characterized by a variety of features not present in informal interactions. 2

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