Majo como marcador conversacional en el español peninsular. Historia, geografía y el mecanismo de la cooptación

The present paper deals with the history and geographical distribution of the vocative use of word majo in European Spanish. Based on this use, majo will develop into a discourse marker, mainly assuming interpersonal and expressive functions. The study explores the first attested cases of this item in the 18th century Spanish, its diffusion as vocative in some registers and the wide range of pragmatic functions in modern rural varieties. The development of majo as a discourse marker is explained following the most recent research about the grammaticalization of these units and the mechanism of cooptation is applied to account for this evolution. The emergence of vocative majo permits to advance a hypothesis that relates its evolution to the semantic and pragmatic changes concerning other vocative-based markers throughout the 20th century in Spanish.