The polysemy of discourse markers: The case of pronto in Portuguese

The aim of this paper is to analyze the meanings and functions of the Portuguese discourse marker pronto, using an oral corpus. The functional polysemy of this lexical item, which is usually viewed rather pejoratively as a mere filler, has resulted from a recent process of grammaticalization of the adjective pronto (‘ready, quick’), with the meanings of ‘finished’ or ‘complete’ (in the case of a thing) or ‘prepared for’ (for a person or thing). In this paper, we show how the different pragmatic-discoursal uses distinguished in the corpus (concluding, agreeing, explaining, imposing, punctuating, phatic, and emotive) are metonymically and metaphorically related to two initial mental images and their implications in different cognitive and communicative domains: the retrospective image of a finished process (concluding, agreeing, turn-yielding) and the prospective image of an available process (imposing, explaining, punctuating, turn-taking). We then go on to describe the process of grammaticalization. Finally, we identify the cognitive and pragmatic factors of the polysemy of the discourse markers and discuss the ‘invariant meaning’ hypothesis put forward by Fischer (2000).