Discourse Markers

Tony Jeong
• Grammar of Spoken English

• Pragmatic markers

• Discourse markers
 Pragmatic Markers
• Mark speakers’ personal meanings, their
organizational choices, attitudes and
feelings.
• Include stance markers, which express
speakers’ attitudes and positions, hedges,
(which enable speakers to make their
utterances less assertive), and common
interjections, (which encode speakers’
affective reactions).
 Discourse Markers
• Words and phrases outside of the clause
structure, that function to link segments of
the discourse to one another in ways which
reflect choices of monitoring, organization
and management exercised by the speaker.

• Have a number of communicative functions

including the marking of responses in
conversation and organizing discourse
through the marking of shifts and
boundaries in ongoing talk.
 Discourse Markers
• The most common discourse markers in
everyday informal spoken language:
– single words:
• anyway, cos, fine, good, great, like, now, oh, okay,
right, so, well
– phrasal and clausal items
• you know, I mean, as I say, for a start, mind you

• Items such as well and right were within the

top 50 most frequently occurring words
because of their high frequency as
discourse markers in conversation.
Discourse markers as monitors
• When we speak, we orient towards our listener(s)
and constantly monitor what we are saying and how
it is being received.
• Discourse markers have an important role in this.
• Used to mark reformulations, where the speaker has
not selected the most appropriate way of expressing
things and is adding to or refining what they say
with a more apt word or phrase, or else drawing
attention to a word or phrase.
• Most common:
(as I was saying, as it were, I mean, if you like, in other
words, not to say, so to speak, strictly speaking, to put it
another way, well )
Discourse markers as monitors
• (In writing) In specific areas such as space
exploration, computer science, and popular music,
an author can expect many young readers to have a
considerable amount of existing knowledge.
• Used in relation to shared knowledge. you know is
the most frequent chunk of all, and is an important
signal of (projected or assumed) shared knowledge
between speaker and listener, as well as being a
topic-launcher.
• Two of the most common discourse markers are you
know and (you) see. Both of these signal that
speakers are sensitive to the needs of their listeners
and are monitoring the state of shared knowledge in
the conversation.
Discourse markers as monitors
• (You) see projects the assumption that the
listener may not have the same state of
knowledge as the speaker:

• You know projects the assumption that

knowledge is shared or that assertions are
uncontroversial, and reinforces common
points of reference, or checks that the
listener is following what is being said:
Discourse markers as monitors
• Used to mark shared knowledge. In this
way they are central to a process which
binds participants in a conversation as they
constantly mark, monitor, and project
shared knowledge and shared space.
• For example, discourse markers have a
binding effect for the speakers, who use
them to draw on shared knowledge and a
shared sense of empathy.
• S1: . . . he thought it would be best if he wasn’t living with his family. Then the husband
• and wife obviously split up.
• S2: Oh.
• S1: And then
• S2: How sad.
• S1: you know he he went with friends obviously for a drink to you know drown his
• sorrows.
• S2: Yeah.
• S1: And ended up
• S2: On the street.
• S1: on the street. And she doesn’t know where he is or anything.
• S2: Could’ve just cracked. Well it must have been he did crack.
• S1: Well yes. Yes.
• S2: Because everything collapsed round him. He was obviously a very responsible chap.
• He [unintelligible] bread-winner.
• S1: He was fine. I mean no different from the rest of us
(CANCODE)

This tale could have been told without the use of discourse markers, but it would have
lacked the ties to the speakers’ shared world. The discourse markers place the speakers
relative to the sad tale. They converge on an understanding of how it could have happened
to anyone.