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 - 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.

This book is a contribution to the growing field of diachronic construction grammar. Focus is on corpus evidence for the importance of including conventionalized pragmatics within construction grammar and suggestions for how to do so. The empirical domain is the development of Discourse Structuring Markers in English such as after all, also, all the same, by the way, further and moreover (also known as Discourse Markers). The term Discourse Structuring Markers highlights their use not only to connect discourse segments but also to shape discourse coherence and understanding. Monofunctional Discourse Structuring Markers like further, instead, moreover are distinguished from multifunctional ones like after all and by the way. Drawing on usage-based work on constructionalization and constructional changes, the book is in three parts: foundational concepts, case studies, and currently open issues in diachronic construction grammar. These open issues are how to incorporate the concepts subjectification and intersubjectification into a constructional account of change, whether position in a clause is a construction, and the nature of constructional networks and how they change.

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.

This book offers a corpus-based comparative study of an almost entirely unexplored set of multi-word lexical items serving pragmatic or text-structuring functions. Part One provides a descriptive account of multi-word discourse markers in written English, French and German, focussing on dicussion of interlingual equivalence. Part Two examines the use of multi-word markers by non-native speakers of English and discusses lexicographical and pedagogical implications.

How do you get from ‘after all those movies’ to ‘I went to a movie after all’?

The first handbook to survey and expand the burgeoning field of corpus pragmatics, the intersection of pragmatics and corpus linguistics.