The repetition of the vocative as a mark of irony in the colonial text El Güegüense

Abstract

The colonial text El Güegüense is considered a testimony of the Central American indigenous culture, since it shows the colonial reality and the experience of marginalized groups who had no voice, but who used this type of demonstration to denounce all aspects of social life impregnated with injustice, corruption, abuses of power. It is not surprising, then, that such text has been the subject of multiple studies: from historical, social, literary and linguistic. The approach presented here is more of the linguistic in nature, because the analysis was concentrated on the reference, which allows the participants to follow up on the discourse through different grammatical resources that can be observed throughout the text. This count showed the majority presence of the vocative with a clear ironic intention of social denunciation.