Pues en el castellano andino ecuatoriano y colombiano: sus diversas formas y funciones discursivas

There is no doubt that linguistic changes resulting from language contact are shaped both by the structures of each language, and by a series of extralinguistic factors, such as the type of contact, the socio-historical, political and cultural context of its speakers, the constant mobilizations, technological changes, individual and family histories, the speakers' communicative interactions, as well as the (self)evaluation that speakers have of their languages. In this context, this article proposes to analyze the way monolingual Spanish speakers from the Ecuadorian Highlands (Sierra) and southern Andean Colombia use pues when postponed to any one utterance. One of the factors we take into account is intense longterm contact between Quichua and Spanish. After a brief clarification of concepts and literature review, this study focuses exclusively on the use of pues as discursive marker (DM) occurring at the end of a communicative instance, as in: A. Darling, I am dying to see you! B. Come then! We will also try to determine this MD origin, functions and values. Secondly, we try to determine the role that the Quichua has in the frequent use of pues, its multifunctionality and the variety of senses. We thus show the use of this particle in Highland Ecuadorian Spanish, and, to a lesser extent, in southern Colombia. The analyzed data suggest that the described phenomenon results from several factors: the characteristics and evolution of each one of the languages in contact, the presence of Quichua as an accelerator of the frequent use of pues as a discourse marker in both Highland Ecuadorian Spanish and the Spanish spoken by monolingual Spanish speakers in Southern Andean Colombia.