A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

1990:391). Since most researchers agree that discourse markers must be described at a
level of discourse above the sentence level (see also Blakemore 2004:221), it is odd that
oh would be excluded as a discourse marker when oh serves a discourse function – to
express the emotional state of the speaker. Others, such as Aijmer and Simon-
Vandenbergen, have since followed Fraser by making a formal distinction between
discourse markers and pragmatic markers, in that, they consider discourse markers to be a
subclass of pragmatic markers, which function only to “mark coherence relations”; and
pragmatic markers, to be the “signals in the communication situation guiding the
addressee’s interpretation” (see Aijmer and Simon-Vandenbergen 2006:2-3).
What I find equally unattractive about Fraser’s approach is that because he (and now
others) does not include interpersonal type markers into his inventory of “discourse
markers,” he is forced to create various classes of “pragmatic” markers in order to
account for a multitude of expressions which all appear to work at a level above the
sentence. In short, since they all appear to serve some discourse function, why not call
them all discourse markers? Also, one overreaching consequence of his approach is that
the “multiple functions of markers – including, critically, social interactional functions –
are downplayed (if noted at all) and not open to linguistic explanation” (Schiffrin
2003:59). The result is that analyses such as those espoused by Fraser (and others), miss,
I believe, the central defining characteristic of discourse markers: their multifunctionality
on different planes of discourse. “It is this multifunctionality on different planes of
discourse that helps to integrate the many different simultaneous processes underlying the
constructions of discourse, and thus helps to create coherence” (Schiffrin 2003:58).
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