El marcador pragmático <i>es que</i> en el lenguaje juvenil madrileño

Abstract This article investigates the construction with es que (‘it is that’) in contemporary Madrilenian Spanish youth language. Apart from the analysis by Fuentes Rodríguez ( 1997 ; 2015 ), this fixed, almost grammaticalized, pattern has not received sufficient attention of scholars. The present study wants to uncover the full range of functions that the construction with es que can assume, by zooming in on its productive use in teenage talk. Based on a representative sample collected from the CORMA corpus ( Corpus Oral de Madrid ), the analysis argues that it constitutes a pragmatic marker, i.e. a multifunctional element with a procedural meaning whose concrete interpretation is negotiated by the context. It is shown that the linguistic item shares functions not only with other pragmatic markers, but also with the constructions of insubordination and dislocation.