Explicitness and Meaning Construction: The Spanish Discourse Marker bueno in Historical Theater Texts

Abstract We analyze variation and change in the use of the polyfunctional discourse marker bueno 'well' in a corpus of more than 500 Spanish theater plays dated between 1968 and 2020. We hypothesize that playwrights specifically use bueno to make explicit reference to mental states of the characters, which may otherwise be hard to infer by the actors and the audience. To examine this hypothesis, we focus on the role of stage directions. Combining qualitative and quantitative analysis of more than n = 2800 tokens of bueno , we first demonstrate that bueno is more likely to be prefaced with a stage direction when expressing hedged disagreement than topic management functions. We argue that this difference is due to the fact that in contrast to topic management functions, the actors and audience need a model of the mental states of the characters in the plays to identify hedged disagreement. Second, our analysis demonstrates a consolidation of the hedged disagreement function of bueno in the theater plays over time, both in terms of overall probability of use with that function and a decrease in the reliance of stage directions for meaning construction. We propose that in Spanish theater texts, bueno has become a marker of conflict interaction in the sense of Glenn (2019).