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and demands, as well as the nature of the social exchange, the role of the speaker and the
role assigned to the hearer (Brinton 1996:38). Brinton also notes that this two-fold
function of discourse markers is already recognized by Schiffrin, since Schiffrin
recognizes discourse markers as providing “coordinates within their context by indexing
utterances either to the participants (focus on the speaker is proximal and on the hearer is
distal) or to the text (preceding discourse being proximal and the following discourse
being distal) (Brinton 1996:39, summing up Schiffrin 1987a:316-317, 1987b:25). More
recently, Schiffrin has stated: “discourse is defined both as structural – a unit of language
larger than a sentence – and as pragmatic, that is, language in use. Thus it is not
surprising that DMs, as terms that define units of discourse, can also be identified as both
text- and speaker-based” (Schiffrin 2003:459). The cross-linguistic evidence also speaks
to this duality of function of discourse markers, but as we will see in Section 2.3.4, the
cross-linguistic data also show that some discourse markers may have both textual and
interpersonal functions simultaneously.
2.2 Relevance theorists’ view of discourse markers
Before we examine the cross-linguistic evidence, it is perhaps worth mentioning the
approach that relevance theorists have taken towards the characterization of discourse
markers. Their view of markers is embedded within the framework of RELEVANCE
THEORY (“RT”), a theory which characterizes human communication in terms of a
communicator who provides evidence of their intention to convey a certain meaning and
an audience (the interlocutor) who must infer what that meaning is based upon the
evidence put forth (Wilson and Sperber 2004). The underlying principle here is that the
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