Based on this difference, they set out, in second place, the interactional, meta-discursive and cognitive macro-functions1. They would include in the first category the prototypical markers of communicative immediacy, which indicate a cooperative or conflictive reaction to what has been said by the interlocutor. They indicate the interlocutors’ conversational movements, and therefore, in their analysis, it is necessary to consider who uses the marker, the speaker or the listener. Within this macro-function the discursive strategies which manifest the interlocutor’s reaction are found, whether they be collaborative and corroborate what was said by the speaker, or reactive, as a manifestation of disagreement or as a request for clarification (López Serena & Borreguero Zuloaga, 2010: 354-357). On the other hand, the meta-discursive function is related to the discourse’s process of linguistic expression, wherein it is possible to identify the cohesive mechanisms which provide it with order and structure in order to facilitate its processing, as well as those which allow for the linguistic formulation of the textual content, revealing the relationship between the speaker and his/her own discourse in the phase of planning and development. This macro-function may be seen both in terms of communicative immediacy and distance in discourse whether conceptionally spoken or written, although some subfunctions such as the structuring of information, are commonly found “in written texts through a larger number of tagging elements” (López Serena & Borreguero Zuloaga, 2010: 350). The final macro-function, the cognitive, is related to the connectors, markers that are normally, although not exclusively, used in conceptionally written discourses (López Serena & Borreguero Zuloaga, 2010: 373). The functions included within this macro-function, are, amongst others, that of indicating logical-argumentative relationships established between the propositional contents of the phrasal and inter-phrasal elements of the text –the logical-argumentative function–; between content which transmits the discourse and the knowledge shared or presupposed by the participants in the communication, and which allow for inferences – the inferential function–; or between the textual content and the speaker’s attitude – the modal function – (López Serena & Borreguero Zuloaga, 2010: 351-352).

3. Methodology & corpus

The principal objective of this study is to extend the analysis of markers on social media with consideration of their presence and functions not only on Twitter but also on Facebook and YouTube. In order to identify the most frequent examples in the corpus elaborated for this investigation, the classification proposed by Martín Zorraquino & Portolés Lázaro (1999) has been employed and some of the postulations compiled in the Diccionario de partículas discursivas del español (Dictionary of discursive particles in Spanish) (Briz Gómez et al., 2008) as well as in studies dedicated to connectors (Domínguez García, 2007) and interactive markers (Cortés Rodríguez & Camacho Adarve, 2005). Furthermore, with the objective of determining their functions as regards their position in the continuum between communicative immediacy and distance, the analysis of macro-functions proposed by López Serena & Borreguero Zuloaga (2010) has been applied.