The study of discourse markers has been a hot topic in linguistics in recent years, yet their semantics has not been dealt with in detail. This is largely due to a widespread assumption that they play a strictly pragmatic role and therefore fall outside the realm of semantics. This book applies the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to analyze a set of four discourse markers (bueno, pues, o sea, entonces), as used in a corpus of conversational Colombian Spanish. It demonstrates that these markers do carry semantic meaning and that they can be...