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conjunction and (in sentence level grammar) may only link items of the same word class<br />

or sentence constituent, but when used as a discourse marker (above the sentence level),<br />

and may link distinct linguistic units. For example, in (2) below, discourse marker and<br />

links a declarative sentence with an interrogative sentence, showing dependence not upon<br />

smaller linguistic units (such as when and connects two noun phrases or two verb<br />

phrases), but upon the discourse structure itself.<br />

(2) Discourse marker and linking distinct units (from Schiffrin 1987:38)<br />

Debby: I don’t like that.<br />

Zelda: I don’t like that. And, is he accepting it?<br />

By “brackets,” she means the marking of the boundaries of discourse units, or what she<br />

calls “units of talk” (Schiffrin 1987:31). The term “units of talk” is intentionally kept<br />

vague in this definition since discourse markers do not demarcate only sentences, but<br />

may mark other units of talk such as a propositions, speech acts, or tone units (see<br />

Schiffrin 1987:31). According to Schiffrin, “[m]eta-linguistic brackets, for example, can<br />

mark a discourse unit as long as a conversation or as short as a word; they can mark units<br />

embedded within larger units, e.g. reasons within explanations, or answers within<br />

question/answer pairs” (Schiffrin 1987:36). So, it is in this manner that the term<br />

“bracket” is being used in her operational definition.<br />

Later in that work, her operational definition for discourse markers was refined into a<br />

more theoretical one, where she tentatively (“tentative” because she admittedly did not<br />

have the benefit of cross-linguistic data to inform her formulation) specifies the<br />

19

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