In oral discourse, discourse markers convey values and functions based on how speakers use them. This can be observed in the use of luego (‘then’) and después (‘after’) in the city of Granada, Spain; both words denote posteriority, either as organizers of a set of narrated events or as structurers and categorizers of information. Following a sociolinguistic analysis of two samples collected in the city of Granada at different times, we conclude that the use of both forms decreases over time, but luego is much more common in Granada's oral discourse, especially for ordering narrative sequences. Likewise, these forms tend to be combined with connecting elements, which support the discourse, such as the conjunction y (‘and’), particularly in the middle of an intervention. The use of both markers is also determined by the age and level of education of speakers; the use of después is relegated to third-generation and educated speakers, as they prefer it as a temporal connector.
Escobar et al. (Wed,) studied this question.