The pragmatic meaning of (que) es/era broma in Spanish: a discourse marker?

This paper seeks to contribute to the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characterization of the expression “(que) es/era broma” (meaning ‘just kidding’), considering the extent to which it can be understood as a Spanish discursive marker (Portolés and Martín Zorraquino, 1999). The data are drawn from the Diachronic Corpus of Spanish, the Corpus of 21st Century Spanish, and the Reference Corpus of Current Spanish. The analysis focuses on the expression’s degree of formal fixation, the previous situational, contextual, or textual referent, its position in the discourse (preceding pause, postponement, periphery), its mitigating value, and its pragmatic meaning. We observed that its postponed appearance after a sentence, discourse, or situation modifies the whole previous expression, creating a new meaning and inviting the recipient to reconsider the information within a non-bona fide frame, one which mitigates its initial literal impact. An updating of the information is thus produced, and this new content is re-framed as humorous (Attardo, 1991, 2001 and 2006; Attardo and Raskin, 1991) and involves attenuation or mitigation.