A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

(7) Marker because (Schiffrin 1987:204)
a) Because we got too many of our old friends, y’know, that uh… (p. 197)
b) cause the younger one’s gonna come for dinner. (p. 204)
While the first three criteria in (4a-c) speak to syntactic or phonological features, the
criterion in (4d) speaks to the multifunctionality of discourse markers, which according to
Schiffrin, is “one of the central defining features of discourse markers” (Schiffrin
2001:67). This multifunctionality has two aspects to it. First, Schiffrin’s discourse
markers showed that they are able to display relationships between both local and global
levels of discourse. For Schiffrin, a local level of discourse is the relationship that a
discourse marker displays between adjacent utterances, while a global level of discourse
is the relationship that a discourse marker displays between wider spans of discourse.
This can be seen in the following example where marker because operates on both a local
and global level of discourse.
(8) Marker because at both local and global levels of discourse (Schiffrin 2003:57-58)
Debby: (a) Yeh. Well some people before they go to the doctor, they’ll talk to a
friend, or a neighbor.
(b) Is there anybody that [uh…
Henry: (c) [Sometimes it works.
(d) Because there’s this guy Louie Gelman,
(f) he went to a big specialist,
(g) and the guy … analyzed it wrong.
[narrative not included]
(j) So doctors are – well they’re not God either!
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