A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

3.1 Discourse connectives
3.1.1 Initial position
The following discourse markers fit most of the criteria for English discourse
markers described by Schiffrin, in that, they all occur in initial position, may have tonic
stress, show syntactic detachability from their containing clauses (except for mii dash
which shows loose detachability), and have both primary functions in the ideational plane
of discourse (in sentence grammars) and secondary functions in other planes of discourse
(above the sentence level). In other words, like some of the English discourse markers
such as and, but, because, for example, these discourse markers (except for onzaam) have
functions which reflect their grammatical or lexical use in sentence grammars. Their
sentence level functions are essentially exploited to perform work above the sentence
level. While this is the predominant pattern, onzaam ‘because’ does not show this
tendency; or at the very least, it is not transparent how its discourse function is related to
its sentence level meaning ‘overly, too much’, if at all. This is not problematic, however,
since it has been observed that some functions of discourse markers do not entirely reflect
their functions within sentence grammars (see Grimes 1975:4, Schiffrin 1987:320,
Schourup 1985:123). Nevertheless, all of these discourse markers bracket linguistic units
in some way on both local and global levels, relating prior text to upcoming text in ways
which achieve textual coherence. In other words, they act as the “discourse glue” which
holds or binds the text together. The type of coherence created is largely dependent upon
the discourse marker in use. The major discourse connectives observed in the data are
discussed below.
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