A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

which is the core defining feature of discourse markers, and is a feature which appears to
hold true for discourse markers across languages, whatever their form or position.
Finally, while this definition is broad enough to include any form that a language (or
their speakers rather) may designate as a discourse marker, it must be reiterated here that
the actual form or docking spot of discourse markers appears to be largely constrained by
the existing grammatical machinery (i.e. grammar, grammatical categories, lexical
inventory). In other words, if a language makes heavy use of affixes, such as many of the
indigenous languages of the Americas, then it should be no surprise that some discourse
markers in those languages would occur as affixes. Conversely, in languages which are
not richly inflected, we would not expect to find many, if any, discourse markers which
occur as affixes. This is indeed what we find for English. The same is true for potential
docking spots for discourse markers. Recall that the Amazonian language Yagua has a
discourse marker which occurs as a second position discourse clitic. Ojibwe, as we will
see, has this as well. These languages make regular use of second position, and so
naturally, second position serves as a potential docking spot for discourse markers. To
my knowledge, we find no such markers in English (except for special discourse related
phenomena such as when exemplifying or contrastive markers are used to highlight the
initial element), or in other languages which do not make regular use of second position.
My ultimate point here is that speakers of a language tend to use the existing machinery
available in their language in order to accomplish discourse related work. Not just any
machinery, but machinery which might lend itself to the speaker for work at the discourse
level.
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