Discourse markers constitute an important part of linguistic communication, and research on this phenomenon has been a thriving field of study over the past three decades. However, a problem that has plagued this research is that these markers exhibit a number of structural characteristics that are hard to interpret based on existing methodologies, such as grammaticalization. This study argues that it is possible to explain such characteristics in a meaningful way. It presents a cross-linguistic survey of the development of discourse markers, their important role in communication, and their relation to the wider context of sociocultural behaviour, with the goal of explaining their similarities and differences across a typologically wide range of languages. By giving a clear definition of discourse markers, it aims to provide a guide for future research, making it essential reading for students and researchers in linguistics, and anyone interested in exploring this fascinating linguistic phenomenon.

Discourse markers constitute an important part of linguistic communication, and research on this phenomenon has been a thriving field of study over the past three decades. However, a problem that has plagued this research is that these markers exhibit a number of structural characteristics that are hard to interpret based on existing methodologies, such as grammaticalization. This study argues that it is possible to explain such characteristics in a meaningful way. It presents a cross-linguistic survey of the development of discourse markers, their important role in communication, and their relation to the wider context of sociocultural behaviour, with the goal of explaining their similarities and differences across a typologically wide range of languages. By giving a clear definition of discourse markers, it aims to provide a guide for future research, making it essential reading for students and researchers in linguistics, and anyone interested in exploring this fascinating linguistic phenomenon.

This book investigates phenomena at the grammar–discourse interface with a strong focus on discourse markers, whose development and concrete uses in a given language tend to be based on a close interplay of grammatical and discourse-related forces. The topics range from the transition of linguistic signs “out of” sentence grammar and “into” the domain of discourse to differences between more grammatical vs. more discourse-pragmatic expressions in terms of structural behavior and cognitive processing, and the different, intricate ways in which the usage conditions and meanings of grammatical constituents or structural units are affected by the discourse context in which they are used. The twelve studies in this book are based on fresh empirical data from languages such as English, Basque, Korean, Japanese and French and involve the study of linguistic expressions and structures such as pragmatic markers and particles, comment clauses, expletives, adverbial connectors, and expressives.

This pioneering study highlights the importance in linguistic communication of discourse markers, a previously neglected area of research.

Discourse markers - the particles oh, well, now, then, you know and I mean, and the connectives so, because, and, but and or - perform important functions in conversation. Dr Schiffrin's approach is firmly interdisciplinary, within linguistics and sociology, and her rigourous analysis clearly demonstrates that neither the markers, nor the discourse within which they function, can be understood from one point of view alone, but only as an integration of structural, semantic, pragmatic, and social factors. The core of the book is a comparative analysis of markers within conversational discourse collected by Dr Schiffrin during sociolinguistic fieldwork. The study concludes that markers provide contextual coordinates which aid in the production and interpretation of coherent conversation at both local and global levels of organization. It raises a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues important to discourse analysis - including the relationship between meaning and use, the role of qualitative and quantitative analyses - and the insights it offers will be of particular value to readers confronting the very substantial problems presented by the search for a model of discourse which is based on what people actually say, mean, and do with words in everyday social interaction.

Discourse is language as it occurs, in any form or context, beyond the speech act. It may be written or spoken, monological or dialogical, but there is always a communicative aim or purpose. The present volume provides systematic orientation in the vast field of studying discourse from a pragmatic perspective. It first gives an overview of a range of approaches developed for the analysis of discourse, including, among others, conversation analysis, systemic-functional analysis, genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, corpus-driven approaches and multimodal analysis. The focus is furthermore on functional units in discourse, such as discourse markers, moves, speech act sequences, discourse phases and silence. The final section of the volume examines discourse types and domains, providing a taxonomy of discourse types and focusing on a range of discourse domains, e.g. classroom discourse, medical discourse, legal discourse, electronic discourse. Each article surveys the current state of the art of the respective topic area while also presenting new research findings.

This volume provides new insights into the nature of the Early Modern English discourse markers marry, well and why through the analysis of three corpora (A Corpus of English Dialogues, 1560-1760, the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, and the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English). By combining both quantitative and qualitative approaches in the study of pragmatic markers, innovative findings are reached about their distribution throughout the period 1500-1760, their attestation in different speech-related text types as well as similarities and differences in their functions. Additionally, this work engages in a sociopragmatic study, based on the sociopragmatically annotated Drama Corpus of almost a quarter of a million words, to enhance our understanding about their use by characters of different social status and gender. This volume therefore constitutes an essential piece of the puzzle in our attempt to gain a full picture of discourse marker use.

"Metalanguage in Interaction" is about the crystallization of metalanguage employed throughout interaction into the discourse markers which permeate talk. Based on close analysis of naturally-occurring Hebrew conversation, it is a synchronic study of the grammaticization of discourse markers, a phenomenon until now mostly studied from a diachronic perspective. It constitutes the first monograph in the fields of Hebrew interactional linguistics and Hebrew discourse markers. The book first presents what is unique to the present approach to discourse markers and gives them an operational definition. Discourse markers are explored as a system, illuminating their patterning in terms of function, structure, and the moments in interaction at which they are employed. Next, detailed analysis of four Hebrew discourse markers illuminates not only the functions and grammaticization patterns of these markers, but also what they reveal about quintessential aspects of Israeli society, identity, and culture. The conclusion discusses commonalities and differences in the grammaticization patterns of the four markers, and relates the grammaticization of discourse markers from interaction to projectability in discourse.

The importance of discourse markers (words like 'so', 'however', and 'well') lies in the theoretical questions they raise about the nature of discourse and the relationship between linguistic meaning and context. They are regarded as being central to semantics because they raise problems for standard theories of meaning, and to pragmatics because they seem to play a role in the way discourse is understood. In this new and important study, Diane Blakemore argues that attempts to analyse these expressions within standard semantic frameworks raise even more problems, while their analysis as expressions that link segments of discourse has led to an unproductive and confusing exercise in classification. She concludes that the exercise in classification that has dominated discourse marker research should be replaced by the investigation of the way in which linguistic expressions contribute to the inferential processes involved in utterance understanding.

Based on a rich set of historical data, this book traces the development of pragmatic markers in English, from hwæt in Old English and whilom in Middle English to whatever and I'm just saying in present-day English. Laurel J. Brinton carefully maps the syntactic origins and development of these forms, and critically examines postulated unilineal pathways, such as from adverb to conjunction to discourse marker, or from main clause to parenthetical. The book sets case studies within a larger examination of the development of pragmatic markers as instances of grammaticalization or pragmaticalization. The characteristics of pragmatic markers - as primarily oral, syntactically optional, sentence-external, grammatically indeterminate elements - are revised in the context of scholarship on pragmatic markers over the last thirty or more years.