A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

“[i]nferential comprehension involves the construction and manipulation of conception
representations” (Wilson and Sperber 1993:10). Applied to discourse markers, then,
discourse markers aid in the search for relevance by guiding an audience to the
appropriate contextual affects which ultimately lead to the appropriate interpretation of
an utterance. While it has been claimed by some that discourse markers encode only
procedural information and are not truth-conditional in the sense that they do not affect
the truth-conditionality of the expressions that contain them (see Andersen 1998, Jucker
1993, Fraser 1996, 1998, 1999), it is largely recognized now that discourse markers may
encode both types of information (i.e. procedural and conceptual). For example, Ziv
showed that the Hebrew marker kaze encodes procedural meaning while at the same time
affecting truth conditions of its containing utterances (Ziv 1998, Blakemore 2004:230).
On the other hand, non-truth-conditional discourse markers such as in contrast, in other
words, as a result have been argued to encode concepts rather than procedures
(Blakemore 2004:230).
Fraser (1990, 1999) is one of the contributors within the RT framework for the
characterization of discourse markers, and I will briefly describe his approach. Fraser’s
characterization assumes that sentence meaning is analyzable into two separate types of
conventionally encoded information: content (propositional content) and pragmatic
(signals of the speaker’s communicative intentions). He calls the “signals of speaker’s
communicative intentions” pragmatic markers, and further divides pragmatic markers
into three major types: BASIC PRAGMATIC MARKERS, COMMENTARY PRAGMATIC
MARKERS, and PARALLEL PRAGMATIC MARKERS. Basic pragmatic markers include
expressions such as please, and performative expressions such as I claim and I promise,
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