Luego and despues with a textual function: Discursive use and variation in the Panhispanic educated norm

One of our previous works had as its aim to analyse the behaviour of luego and despues in the speech of Seville. The results obtained were significant, but they required an expansion of the material subject to analysis; hence our decision to study luego and despues with a textual function in the Macrocorpus of the Linguistic Educated Norm in Major Cities of the Hispanic World. The focus will be specifically placed on their role as time connectors and as information-structuring units. This will allow us to check whether the patterns of variation and discursive behaviour observed so far are common to spoken Spanish as a whole, or whether diatopical or diastratic differences arise which help to shape the usage profile of these two alternating units.