A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

d) But, I went into the army (p. 155)
e) Or some good uh:… very good literature. (p. 179)
f) So, yeh, she would hit kids with a ruler. (p. 199)
g) Because the Jewish people are the most liberal minded people in the world. (p. 213)
h) Now our street isn’t that nice. (p. 231)
i) Then when they went ho-off eh for their nap, I:- (p. 251)
j) Y’know when you get older, you just don’t keep socializing anymore. (p. 277)
k) I mean let’s get married! (p. 297)
Examining these various examples, it is easy to see that Schiffrin’s criteria for what
would allow an expression to be used as a marker are based upon the distribution of the
markers occurring in her data. For example, her discourse markers all appear on the
periphery of the sentence in such a manner that they remain “independent of sentential
structure” (Schiffrin 1983:32). According to her, this means that their removal from the
sentence “leaves the sentence structure intact” (Schiffrin 1987:32). It is in this manner
that Schiffrin’s discourse markers are “detachable from a sentence.”
Their positional distribution reveals that Schiffrin’s markers appear predominantly in
initial position. While this appears to be the common position for her markers, the
markers then and y’know may also occur in other positions. For example, she notes that
then may occur utterance initial and utterance final, but states that “initial then has wider
scope as a discourse marker than final then” (Schiffrin 1987:247). She also notes that
most of the tokens of then in her corpus were usually preceded by other markers (see
Schiffrin 1987:247 for discussion). For y’know, Schiffrin’s examples show that while
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