Variación dialectal, diafásica y concepcional: el «mejor dicho» colombiano

This paper aims to contribute to research on discourse markers and dialectal and diaphasic variation by focusing on the functional expansion experienced by the reformulation marker mejor dicho in the Colombian variety of Spanish. In oral conversational interaction, the marker has developed conclusive, formulative and modal functional values that distance it from strictly corrective value and European use. In light of the data available in corpora and databases, we assume a process of colloquialization and grammaticalization by subjectivization driven by a double frequency factor: the high frequency of mejor dicho in conversational interaction and its normal use in discursive dynamics of pragmatic intensification in combination with the intensifying resources of colloquial Spanish such as hyperbolic metaphor, enumeration series, exclamation, emphatic statement or consecutive constructions.