The Signalling Nous in the Oral Discourse in Spanish as a Second Language

Signalling nouns are cohesive devices that allow the encapsulation of previous textual fragments through nominal phrases. These phrases function as a start for the subsequent informative organization and incorporate subjective conceptualizations about referred fragments, which gives them the capacity to express implicit evaluations and thus becoming argumentation devices. This article studies the functional performance of signalling nouns in Spanish as a second language oral speech on the basis of a corpus of five Spanish lessons that were audio recorded. The study findings show the lack of these cohesive devices and the tendency to use grammatical anaphora instead.