Borrowing evidential functions from Quechua: The role of pues as a discourse marker in Andean Spanish

This paper is a tentative description of the function that the non-standard use of the particle pues has in Andean Spanish, a dialect that exists due to the contact of Spanish and Andean indigenous languages. Following Prince's framework of information status of entities, this pues will be analyzed, within a qualitative approach, as a confirmation and clarification device which is attached at the end of evoked or inferred utterances when an assumption of shared knowledge has been disturbed. After an introduction to the problem and a review of the relevant literature, an analysis will be presented with the help of examples taken from ten sociolinguistic interviews conducted with male Spanish-Quechua bilinguals. A discussion and a 'problems and questions for further research' section will be followed by concluding comments on how this use of pues, which has a discourse marker role in Andean Spanish, has borrowed evidential functions from Quechua.