A methodological approach to the study of the use of argumentative connectors as an indicator of pragmatic competence in language learners and native speakers of Spanish

Pragmatic competence involves the comprehension and production of communicative action in discourse. Achieving advanced pragmatic and discourse competence in an L2 implies having at one's disposal a set of skills that enable the speaker to produce and understand communicative action in discourse. One of these skills concerns the appropriate use of discourse markers, and more precisely, argumentative connectors, as they are tools for argumentative activity, an inherent dimension in human communication. Previous research on the subject has shown that learners tend to use fewer and less diverse argumentative connectors than native speakers. This could be mainly due to the polyfunctional nature of discourse markers and the complicated syntactic structures in which they are embedded, which can be challenging for an inexperienced speaker. Thus, in this article, we examine pragmatic competence in Dutch-speaking learners and native speakers of Spanish with a particular focus on their oral use of argumentative connectors, in order to determine whether and in what respects this use differs or overlaps in the two groups. To this end, we use a contrastive methodology, both qualitative as well as quantitative, which pays specific attention to the polyfunctionality of the connectors pues, entonces, asi and pero. The goal of the study is to determine how this polyfunctionality is reflected in the oral discourse produced by the learner group.