“… entonces tengo que tener esas matas feas”. Análisis variacionista de entonces en el corpus PRESEEA-CALI

This study aimed to analyze the pragmatic functions of the discourse marker entonces as in the PRESEEA-Cali corpus and to run a variationist analysis to find out the patterns of use in the speech community. A total of 1015 occurrences were extracted from the corpus and related to the discursive variables of position within the speech unit, position within the turn and type of discursive sequence, and to the social variables of sex, age and educational level. The grammatical function was found with very few occurrences. Two additional pragmatic functions were identified: the consecutive and the metadiscursive functions. This last one showed two subfunctions, one of reformulation used to explain, and recapitulate and another of information structuring used to continue or delay the discourse. The variationist analysis indicated that the variable of educational level was not significant. The other variables were found to be significant to different functions and subfunctions.