5. Conclusions

The analysis performed shows that connectors and conversational or interactive markers predominate on the social networks Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and that they are generally utilised to modulate the illocutionary force of the enunciation and to manifest agreement or disagreement with what was said in other messages. These are prototypical markers of communicative immediacy which perform the functions of both interactive, such as indicating the reaction – manifestation of agreement or disagreement – relative to the affirmations of an interlocutor (López Serena y Borreguero Zuloaga, 2010: 354-357) and cognitive macro-functions, such as expressing the argumentative relationship between enunciations. In the messages analysed, pues presents a double argumentative and illocutionary value (Briz Gómez, 1993: 173), which is manifest in reactive interventions to indicate disagreement with what was previously said. Pero, the most frequently used logical-argumentative connector in the corpus, by virtue of the varied functions it acquires, is mainly related to cognitive and meta-discursive macro-functions. The first of these includes the logical-argumentative function that pero performs similarly on the three platforms, in order to cancel out –logical-argumentative and anti-orientated function – the conclusions of the previous statement through the enunciation it introduces and which often contains an explanation. Within this function it acquires a restrictive value in messages which can be considered within the written conceptional variety of discourse (López Serena & Borreguero Zuloaga, 2010: 360). This is the case for statements which are syntactically more elaborate, addressed to the group of users, to the audience imagined on the network, and not to a specific interlocutor as a response. In this sense it also performs a meta-discursive macro-function, related to the process of linguistic expression in the discourse, as a mechanism of cohesion, and where it transmits meta-discursive values of control of the act of speaking (Domínguez García, 2007). Other frequently used connectors with these two macro-functions on the three networks are pues, when transmitting co-oriented arguments with a consecutive value in messages corresponding to the written conceptional variety: and incluso, además and encima, which express co-orientated arguments of addition on a rising scale or focus or even intensify the illocutionary value of determined constituents of the enunciation.

The analysis has shown that pero also tends to appear frequently in responses addressed to other users, particularly on Facebook and YouTube, thus adding a refutative value to the restrictive value of the connector, which usually manifests in dialogic contexts and in texts corresponding to the pole of communicative immediacy or to the conceptionally spoken. Said opposition is established between what different enunciations say, placing it amongst the markers with a reactive interactive macro-function, through which the speaker opposes the previous intervention to place the exactitude of the statement in doubt (López Serena & Borreguero Zuloaga, 2010: 361) or to attenuate a criticism of what another participant has said. This fact is hardly surprising if we consider that these are brief argumentative texts posted on spaces that promote polylogical polemic interaction, in particular on YouTube (Bou-Franch y Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2014).

Other frequent markers with an interactive macro-function are claro, which is particularly common on Facebook and YouTube and in messages closer to the informal oral, or conceptionally spoken, variety, to express evidence and reinforce an assertion, often in combination with pero. Less frequent are hombre, bueno, vamos and ¿eh?, with a modal function, utilised as attenuators of the illocutionary force of assertions, normally in responses to tweets and in replies to