A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

2.0 What is a discourse marker?
There has been a struggle in the literature to precisely define the elements which are
widely known as DISCOURSE MARKERS (the term to be used in this thesis). This
situation has been compounded by the many names by which these elements are known,
for example (just to name a few): DISCOURSE MARKER (Schiffrin 1987, Brody 1989,
Jucker & Ziv 1998, Fraser 1990), PRAGMATIC MARKER (Brinton 1996), DISCOURSE
PARTICLE (Schourup 1985, Massam et al. 2006, Davidsen-Nielsen 1996, Hakulinen
1998), UTTERANCE PARTICLE (Kwong 1989), CONNECTIVE (Park 1999, Sadler 2006),
and DISCOURSE CONNECTIVE (Biq 1990), 10 and by the many functions that discourse
markers are said to have, such as: “discourse connectors, turn-takers, confirmation-
seekers, intimacy signals, topic-switchers, hesitation markers, boundary markers, fillers,
prompters, repair markers, attitude markers, and hedging devices” (Jucker and Ziv
1998:1, 2).
Perhaps the biggest difficulty in pinning down a definition, or in delimiting these
elements into some sort of distinct category, stems from the fact that linguistic items or
expressions serving as discourse markers are members of various distinct word classes
“as varied as conjunctions (e.g. and, but, or), interjections (oh), adverbs (now, then), and
lexicalized phrases (y’know, I mean)” (Schiffrin 2001:57). This also forces the question
as to whether these are the only word classes from which discourse markers could be
drawn (as noted by Schiffrin 1987:40). 11
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Both Brinton (1996) and Jucker & Ziv (1998) also give sizeable lists of names for these elements.
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This thesis, in fact, will expand the known word classes or categories from which discourse markers may
be drawn.
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