Understanding Discourse Markers in Communication

Discourse analysis course
Abeer A. Hadi
434822168

Discourse Markers
Introduction:
Semantic connectives have long been a focus of research in cognitive and language development. Suchconnectives as so, because, and but encode causal and adversative relations among events and create textual cohesion (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). Recently, however, researchers have been examining other types of relations that need to be encoded in discourse. Deborah Schiffrin (1987), for example, has focused on 'discourse markers (DMs)', a broader category of connective or relational forms than semantic connectives. Discourse markers are "linguistic, paralinguistic, or nonverbal elements that signal relations between units of talk by virtue of their syntactic and semantic properties and by virtue of their sequential relations as initial or terminal brackets demarcating discourse units" (Schiffrin, 1987: 40). During everyday communication, speakers use discourse

The ideational structure involves relationships such as topic relations and cohesive relations between ideas andpropositions in the discourse. The action structure refers to the relations between speech acts. The exchangestructure indicates the mechanics of turn-taking between participants. The information state involves the everchangingorganization and management of knowledge and meta-knowledge of participants in interactionthroughout the discourse. Finally, the participation framework refers to the means by which speakers andhearers relate to each other (e.g. the relative stance of participants), as well as to the utterances in thediscourse. DMs with ideational functions index mainly coherence between the ideas conveyed in the discoursesuch as cause–result or temporal sequence. On the other hand, DMs that function at the action, exchange,participation framework and informational state levels are interactional in