Pragmatic Markers

Well is the most frequently analysed discourse marker. However, its meaning still remains elusive. The question explored in this paper is to what extent a Contrastive Analysis of a pragmatic marker can help identify its meaning and functions. The answer to this question is supported by an analysis of the occurrences of well in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral and their functional equivalents in the Catalan and Spanish dubbed versions. The analysis provides evidence for considering that pragmatic markers such as well exhibit differences in meaning when compared with logical markers such as but. Their meaning is fully pragmatic and can be represented as a radial category including modal and structural meanings.

The appropriate use of pragmatic markers – non-propositional well, you know, of course, etc. – is necessary for
successful business communication (which is, for the most part, cross-cultural communication), however,
pragmatic markers take a back seat in TEFL, TESL, and most notably, in TESP contexts. In our paper we will,
first of all, discuss the major issues related to the concept of communicative competence as well as the role of
PMs in shaping EFL and ESL speakers’ communicative competence. Next, some remarks will be made about the
possible sources of the difficulties that may hinder the acquisition and/or learning of PMs, finally, the results of a
case study will be presented, which aimed at mapping the functional spectrum of PMs as they are used in
selected General Business English textbooks.

The present study investigates the pragmatic marker "you know" in native and learner English. Previous research on "you know" has suggested that it is highly frequent among native speakers but is used much less by non-native speakers, and that the latter do not use it intersubjectively but rather for discourse-organisational purposes. These claims are put to the test in a quantitative and qualitative analysis of four components of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI), involving upper-intermediate to advanced Dutch, French, German and Spanish learners of English. Comparisons are made with native discourse as it appears in LINDSEI's reference corpus LOCNEC. Nine functions are attested for "you know" in the corpus, and none of these are restricted to the native corpus. Native and non-native speakers alike use you know in highly intersubjective contexts. The main differences between speaker groups are found in the frequency of use: all learner groups use "you know" consistently less frequently than their native peers, and there are markedly fewer learners in each group who use "you know" at all.

В статье обсуждается проблема преобразования классификации речевых актов, заимствованной из философии, в типологическую категорию. Трудность такого преобразования лежит в широкой вариативности формы выражения иллокутивной силы. Несмотря на то, что с основными речевыми актами традиционно ассоциируют определенные формальные признаки (ср. интонационный контур для вопроса), это не позволяет учесть более тонкой классификации (например, противопоставить комплимент сообщению о факте), а главное — полностью исключает из рассмотрения косвенные речевые акты, в природе которых лежит непрямое соответствие формы смыслу сообщения. Для преодоления этого обстоятельства в качестве маркеров категории предлагается рассматривать языковые единицы за пределами речевого акта, а именно специальный класс идиоматичных ответных реплик (ср.: А как же!, Не скажи!, Еще чего!), называемых дискурсивными формулами. Для исследования этого класса авторы опираются на со- ставленный для русского языка список из более 700 формул. Корпусный анализ их употребления показывает, что использование дискурсивных формул во многом зависит от иллокутивной силы высказывания, на которое они реагируют. Сравнение сочетаемости дискурсивных формул в разных языках дает возможность выделить релевантные прагматические противопоставления среди контекстных высказываний. Представленный в статье опыт такого исследования на небольшом фрагменте стимульных речевых актов для русских и английских формул запрета и отказа показывает, что данный материал имеет потенциал для проверки, уточнения и дополнения общепринятой классификации с лингвистического ракурса.

Research in the domain of pragmatic markers has expanded tremendously in the past quarter of a century, focusing on theoretical, taxonomic and methodological issues, studying more and more markers, abandoning the initial anglocentricity to span similar phenomena in a swelling number of languages and language varieties. Understanding Pragmatic Markers is meant to demonstrate not

The present case study takes a discourse-pragmatic approach to some of the most frequently used discourse markers (henceforth DMs) in spoken English: I mean, of course, oh, well, I think and you know. The point of departure in
this research is a set of discourse-pragmatic relations and functions, such as conversation management, thematic control, concession, elaboration, reformulation, ventriloquizing, and marking evidentiality. After looking at which DMs
signal these relations and functions in our corpora, we identify a set of English DMs whose members display markedly different pragmatic behaviours across various subgenres of spoken English such as naturally-occurring conversations
and mediatised political interviews.

This paper presents the extent to which 'like' is used as a pragmatic marker (PM) by Brazilian university students living in Ireland. This is a case study which is part of a broader PhD research project on L2 pragmatic development within a study-abroad context. The results and reflections of this study are based on a sample corpus of spoken language, which comprises four 30-minute informal interactions between 6 participants and the researcher. Drawing on the Limerick Corpus of Irish English, a representative corpus of spoken Irish English (IrE), the interpersonal functions and procedural meanings of the PM 'like' in the participants' L2 are compared and contrasted against those of the IrE data. Quantitatively, the PM 'like' is found to be a keyword in the L2 corpus and three times more frequent by comparison to the IrE data. Qualitatively, this study shows evidence of 'like' being used multifunctionally by the L2-speakers of English, with all functions of the PM also previously described in the literature on IrE. However, some specific functional patterns also emerge from the L2 data, which indicates the pragmatic needs and linguistic demands which may arise during communication when using an L2.

The aim of this paper is to describe and account for the functions of the Greek expression re. Our research is based on the analysis of narrative talk, i.e., on 134 stories that naturally occurred in two conversations between adolescents. We more particularly focused on the appearance of re in interaction where the narrator appeals to his/her audience or where the interlocutors appeal to the narrator. Drawing on the literature of pragmatic markers, we argue that re is a multifunctional marker having as core function the signaling of a presumably unexpected piece of information.

The pragmatic marker 'well' has received a lot of attention in studies on native speaker discourse and has served as an interesting testing ground for theories accounting for the multifunctionality of pragmatic markers. In the rapidly expanding body of research on pragmatic markers in learner English 'well' has also claimed a prominent position, but so far no comparison has been made of how learners of varying mother tongue backgrounds use 'well'. This article offers a Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (cf. Granger 1996) in scrutinising well as a pragmatic marker in the Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Chinese components of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) and comparing these results with Aijmer’s (2011) findings for the Swedish component of LINDSEI and a comparable native speaker corpus. 'Well' is shown to be more prevalent overall in each of the learner corpora than in the native corpus, except for the Chinese (in which 'well' displays a marginal incidence). This overall discrepancy between the learners and native speakers only holds for the speech management functions of well; its attitudinal functions are significantly less common in the learners’ discourse than in the native speakers’. The observed differences are attributed to a complex interplay of factors, involving a.o. the learners’ limited inventory of pragmatic markers, their extensive exposure to 'well', L1 interference, and the speech context.

The paper addresses the issue of categorization and category membership with respect to the functional class of discourse markers. In the course of the paper I will review possible criteria for discourse marker status and examine them from the perspectives of three alternative hypotheses about the development of discourse markers: grammaticalization theory; its modified version, the pragmaticalization hypothesis; and the cooptation hypothesis. The characteristics outlined in the paper suggest that the functional class of DMs constitutes a radial category either in the light of grammaticalization / pragmaticalization or the cooptation hypothesis, thus, a network model along the lines of Pelyvás (1995) is the most appropriate way of characterizing individual DMs in terms of prototypicality.

The aim of the paper is to present the use of the slang word ‘kapish’ as a pragmatic marker in bg-mamma forum platform. The research shows that the word is used in postposition and it usually expresses disregard and disagreement. The investigated marker is used sometimes to show the closeness as well. It is often combined with other rhetorical devices. In: Bulgarian Speech, 3/2016, pp. 33-39.

This article gauges the extent to which so is used as a discourse marker by Belgian native speakers of Dutch who have almost reached the end of formal instruction in English. The interview corpus compiled for this study is further diversified in order to determine the potential influence of distinct learning objectives in foreign language acquisition, with half of the learner participants majoring in English Linguistics, and the other half in Commercial Sciences. Not only is the use of discourse markers in these two sub-corpora juxtaposed from a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, the learner corpus is also set off against a comparable native speaker corpus. The investigation shows that the language learners use so significantly more often than their English peers, and the students of English Linguistics use so slightly more often than those of Commercial Sciences. All ten discourse marker functions of so, which can be situated in three different domains (ideational, interpersonal and textual), are found both in the learner and the native sub-corpora. An initial tentative account of the interrelatedness of these functions points in the direction of polysemy.► The discourse marker so in a diversified learner corpus and a native corpus. ► Learners use so significantly more often than native speakers. ► In the learner corpus Linguistics students use so more than Economics students. ► So functions in the ideational, interpersonal and textual domains. ► Synchronic study of so's functions points at a possible case of polysemy.

Paul Howard is at present one of the best-selling authors of popular fiction in Ireland. His style and ability to capture the spontaneity of spoken Irish English have been praised by critics, who associate his success with the fact that his novels are presented as a transcript of naturally occurring speech. In his Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series, dialect representation has an important role to play in the construction and (re-)creation of the narrative voice and the fictionalised identity of the storyteller. This chapter analyses how the identity of the Irish male is constructed through speech characterization, and  compares the reporting of male and female voices in Howard’s narrative.
The chapter pays particular attention to the use of quotatives, as an example of how this author employs features of spoken discourse in order to connect with his readership. It is widely accepted that in naturally-ocurring spoken discourse, action-oriented narration generally calls for reported speech (Barbieri, 2005: 231), so in the context of Howard’s novels, where the narrative style is built as an emulation of  orality, the fact that quotatives are salient conforms with the overall stylistic strategy employed by the author in constructing the protagonist’s narrative voice. By focusing on the use of quotatives in particular, other issues such as age and ethnicity of the speaker/character are also dealt with.
The chapter  argues that the complexities of fictional dialogue which are creatively exploited in Howard’s writing can reveal much about real spoken discourse in the context that he recreates, i.e. contemporary Dublin English, where the north-south divide represented in the novels is based on the linguistic differentiation between speakers generally coming from areas of high social prestige and those who ‘show strongest identification with traditional conservative Dublin life’ (Hickey 2005: 6-7).

This paper investigates how foreign language learners use discourse markers (such as so, well, you know, I mean) in English speech. These small words that do not contribute much, if anything at all, to the propositional content of a message but modify it in subtle ways, are often considered among the last elements acquired in a foreign language. This contribution reports on close scrutiny of a corpus of English-spoken interviews with Belgian native speakers of Dutch, half of whom are undergraduates majoring in Commercial Sciences and half of whom are majoring in English Linguistics, and sets it off against a comparable native speaker corpus. The investigation shows that the language learners exhibit a clear preference for "operative discourse markers" and neglect or avoid "involvement discourse markers". It is argued that in learner speech the former take on functions typically fulfilled by the latter to a greater extent than in native speech, and that in some cases the learners revert to a code-switching strategy to cater for their pragmatic needs, bringing markers from Dutch into their English speech. Finally, questions are raised as to the place of such pragmatic devices in foreign language learning.

This article analyses the use of particular pragmatic markers in two corpora of spoken London English: the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LIC) and the Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT). We found variation according to sex, ethnicity and geographical location, with a different distribution for each pragmatic marker. The innovative pragmatic marker you get me was most frequent among male non-Anglo Hackney residents, indicating innovation in inner London. We argue that a number of pragmatic markers, most notably you get me, should be regarded as elements of Multicultural London English, along with other features that have already been documented.

The aim of the first part of the paper is to consider possible ways of categorising and mapping the functional spectrum of discourse markers as well as to propose a model of discourse spaces, which, it is my hope, reflects the wide range of
macro- and micro functions DMs fulfill as well as the multi- and interdisciplinary nature of DM research. In the second part, I illustrate two of the possible applications of the proposed
model: (1) its usefulness in mapping the functional spectrum of the English DM oh, (2) the utility of the model for the contrastive analysis of English "oh" and Hungarian "ó".

This chapter describes the interaction between distribution and functional uses of the Italian Adversative Pragmatic Markers (APMs) ma and però in spontaneous spoken language. These forms are claimed to be distributionally and functionally asymmetrical, as ma preferentially occurs in the left periphery, performing a turn-taking function, while only però can appear in the right periphery, with a cohesive function. Results from a semasiological (form-tofunction), corpus-based and multi-level (prosodic, information and functional) investigation show that APM asymmetry is not clear-cut. Although the multi-level description supports Beeching and Detges's (2014) function-periphery asymmetry hypothesis as a general tendency, it also argues in favor of a more fine-grained functional analysis.

The aim of this paper is to describe and account for the use of the Greek address term re peδi mu in everyday storytelling. In particular, we explore re peδi mu in contexts of reformulation, i.e. in discourse fragments where the interlocutor presents what he has just said in a different way. Our research is based on the examination of 288 narratives that naturally occurred in 18 informal conversations. We will argue that re peδi mu is used as a pragmatic marker with special narrative functions. Specifically, as far as the intersubjective level of speech is concerned, we will show that re peδi mu invites the story recipient to focus on the latest and more adequate versions of story information; in the subjective level it highlights the most detailed and important aspects of the story; finally, in the textual level re peδi mu contributes to the story organization.

This paper examines the meanings of the French construction 'je pense (que)' (‘I think (that)’, henceforth JP), as well as its uses in social interaction. We propose an account of JP as a micro-construction with two basic elements of coded meaning, either one of which may be pragmatically foregrounded in a given context of use. As a direct result of its constructional meaning, which we argue is situated at the context level rather than at the content level of discourse (Hansen 2008), the expression frequently functions as a pragmatic marker in conversation. We show that uses of JP may fulfil both interpersonal, face-related functions and discourse-organizational ones. Our analysis has implications for the way JP and similar expressions in French and other languages are categorized and how their pragmatic functions may be seen to have developed. It also raises interesting questions with regard to the psycholinguistic processing of such constructions.

Pragmatic markers (PMs Hereafter) have been a polemic issue in pragmatic research over the past few decades. Although a substantial amount of research has been devoted to PMs in English and some other languages to define, classify and categorize PMs, we are still far from developing an inclusive typology. Drawing on data from a written and spoken corpus in Persian and the current classifications of PMs in literature such as Gonzalez , Akkaya , Brinton (2008), and Fraser's (2009), the present study tried to find out how such markers are realized in Persian. In so doing, attempt has been made to follow a reductionistic approach. The analysis is based on a dichotomy of interpretational/non-interpretational and notional/ non-notional particles. The study will, also, discuss the areas of convergence and divergence in Persian and English and the theoretical and pedagogical implications.

This article investigates how learners of English who are native speakers of Dutch use general extenders such as 'and stuff' and 'or something'. The corpus consists of the Dutch component of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI), which is comprised of fifty interviews of some fifteen minutes each. These data are compared with the Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation (LOCNEC), LINDSEI’s native speaker reference corpus. The study shows that overall frequencies of general extenders point at a close alignment of the two speaker groups, but that discrepancies exist if these numbers are further broken down for the adjunctive and disjunctive categories of general extenders. The former type is used considerably less frequently in the learner corpus than in the native, whereas the opposite holds for the latter. A detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis offers a few tentative explanations for the learners’ choice of general extenders, most notably L1 transfer, the intensity of exposure to certain forms in the target language, and learners’ restricted repertoire of pragmatic devices.

The present case study takes a discourse-pragmatic approach to some of the most frequently used discourse markers (henceforth DMs) in spoken English: I mean, of course, oh, well, I think and you know. The point of departure in this research is a set of discourse-pragmatic relations and functions, such as conversation management, thematic control, concession, elaboration, reformulation, ventriloquizing, and marking evidentiality. After looking at which DMs signal these relations and functions in our corpora, we identify a set of English DMs whose members display markedly different pragmatic behaviours across various subgenres of spoken English such as naturally-occurring conversations and mediatised political interviews. We examine their use in a corpus of political interviews broadcast in English by the BBC and CNN between 2003 and 2011, and compare our results with previous research, performed on the basis of spontaneous, everyday conversations. Our paper has a threefold goal: (1) to present examples of the various discourse-organizing roles and strategic uses of the DMs; (2) to discuss the differences between the selected English DMs' functions across different subgenres of spoken English discourse; and (3) to answer whether or not the uses of the selected discourse markers differ across the various discourse types/genres (spoken English vs. different types of political interviews).

The present paper will analyse the use of "well" as an authentication strategy in Dickens’ David Copperfield. After an overview of the core meaning, functional spectrum and contexts of use identified in previous research based
on naturally-occurring data, I will analyse some of the dialogic and monologic functions of "well". Based on the analysis, in the subsequent sections, I will briefly discuss theoretical issues such as the conceptual core of well, semantic bleaching
and pragmaticalization (cooptation) as well as the issue of using literary texts as data for linguistic analysis.

As a highly frequent discourse marker in spoken English, so prototypically indexes a “resultative” or “inferential” relation between two propositions. This article, however, focuses on instances of so that do not overtly preface a proposition, but occur either at the end of an intonation unit or as intonation units in themselves. It is argued that nonprefatory tokens of so can prompt the interlocutor to recover an implicit proposition and establish the relevance of the prior segment to the turn, or can merely serve as a turn yielding device. This article lays bare these nonprefatory uses of so, as well as the four discourse structures in which they operate, in a corpus of English interviews with native speakers of English and Dutch, enabling the comparison of native and learner data. Contrary to previous studies of discourse markers, and of so in particular, (the nonprefatory use of) so is found to be significantly more frequent in the learners' speech than in the native speakers'. This is attributed to an interplay of three main factors: the learners' desire to be viewed as coherent speakers, their limited inventory of markers, and a functional resemblance of so with comparable markers in the learners' mother tongue.

The present case study takes a discourse-pragmatic approach to some of the most frequently used discourse markers (henceforth DMs) in spoken English: I mean, of course, oh, well, I think and you know. The point of departure in this research is a set of discourse-pragmatic relations and functions, such as conversation management, thematic control, concession, elaboration, reformulation, ventriloquizing, and marking evidentiality. After looking at which DMs signal these relations and functions in our corpora, we identify a set of English DMs whose members display markedly different pragmatic behaviours across various subgenres of spoken English such as naturally-occurring conversations and mediatised political interviews. We examine their use in a corpus of political interviews broadcast in English by the BBC and CNN between 2003 and 2011, and compare our results with previous research, performed on the basis of spontaneous, everyday conversations. Our paper has a threefold goal: (1) to present examples of the various discourse-organizing roles and strategic uses of the DMs; (2) to discuss the differences between the selected English DMs' functions across different subgenres of spoken English discourse; and (3) to answer whether or not the uses of the selected discourse markers differ across the various discourse types/genres (spoken English vs. different types of political interviews).

Pragmatic markers are "a class of short, recurrent linguistic items that generally have little lexical import but serve significant pragmatic functions in conversation" (Andersen 2001:39). While pragmatic markers are receiving growing consideration in the literature, pragmatic markers in South African English have been given little attention compared to other varieties of English. This paper provides a description of the distribution and functions of the pragmatic markers okay, anyway and shame as they occur in the spoken component of the South African version of the International Corpus of English (ICE). Using the commercially available Concordance program, WordSmith Tools, all instances of okay, anyway and shame were identified in the corpus and all non-pragmatic marker instances were then excluded. The remaining instances of okay, anyway and shame were then hand-coded to determine the primary functions that these elements exhibit. The classification of the functions of the pragmatic markers was carried out according to framework for identification of pragmatic markers. The findings of the corpus investigation included identifying the functions of okay as both a conversation-management marker and a basic marker, as well as its role in turn-taking. Anyway was found to function as an interjection, a mitigation marker, a conversation-management marker and a discourse marker. Shame, as a uniquely South African pragmatic marker, was found to function both as an interjection and as a solidarity marker, as an expression of sympathy or sentiment.

[uncorrected proof] This paper investigates the translation and interpretation of the Hungarian discourse marker vajon in the English to Hungarian translation direction. The study seeks to address issues around the translation of discourse markers, and to examine the functions of utterances in which vajon occurs, applying the so-called translation method on data collected from European Parliamentary speeches. The present paper also investigates the techniques of omission and addition as translation solutions, as these could offer insights into the function of discourse markers, as well as the process of translation. Although the small scale of this study does not support broad generalisations, it is found that vajon is without corresponding source forms. This means that the use of vajon is linked to the functions of  vajon-utterances in the source texts, and not to individual linguistic forms. The functions of vajon are given a relevance-theoretic account.

In this paper it is proposed that say-markers can be approached as interactional devices which define the perspective from which to view and assess the source of knowledge imparted by speakers in an institutional setting. Combining research into clausal pragmatic markers with insights from Discourse Space Theory and the time-travelling approach to reality reconstruction, the analysis demonstrates that say-markers are strategically used by courtroom interactants for their immediate interpersonal goals. As the data suggest, in an adversarial context, speakers rely on say-markers to assert authority and to control discourse, on the one hand, and to assess the validity of their interlocutor’s arguments, on the other. Finally, it is observed that say-markers operate as interactional “signposts” which enable purposive shifts between I- and you-perspectives as well as past and present realities.
Keywords: clausal pragmatic markers, courtroom talk, Discourse Space Theory, say-markers, stance

In the present case study we will take a discourse-pragmatic as well as contrastive approach to some of the most frequently used discourse markers in spoken interaction: English I mean, of course, oh, well, I think and you know, and Hungarian hát (~'well'), mondjuk (~'let's say'), ugye (~'is that so?') and amúgy (~'otherwise', ~'by the way'). We will examine their use in three corpora: (1) a corpus of political interviews broadcast by the BBC and CNN between 2003 and 2011, (2) a corpus of different types of media discourse (including political interviews and panel discussions) broadcast between 2009 and 2012 by the Hungarian TV channels Duna TV, ATV, Hír TV, MTV and TV2, and (3) the HuComTech corpus, an annotated collection of informal Hungarian dialogues. The major question we would like to answer is whether or not the uses of the selected discourse markers differ across the various discourse types/genres (natural conversations, different...

This paper investigates the properties of a set of poorly described Italian constructions characterized , at the same time, by (i) a dubitative component, challenging a presupposition generated by the preceding context and (ii) a corrective function. These constructions revolve around four adverbial elements (al massimo, al limite, tutt'al più and caso mai) that have other functions besides the dubi-tative-corrective one. The analysis will illustrate how their dubitative-corrective function emerges in specific discourse configurations and will discuss their further pragmatic uses as mitigators, which appear to be crucially connected to the dubitative component. The theoretical implications of the analysis concern the definition itself of dubitative-corrective construction and the role of dialog-ical contexts in the development of a dubitative-corrective function. It will be shown that the constructions in question, though sharing a dubitative-corrective function, differ in various respects. These differences can be traced back to their different diachronic sources, namely a scalar construction for al massimo, al limite, and tutt'al più, and a conditional construction in the case of caso mai. The evolutionary paths leading from these source constructions to dubitative-corrective constructions present a different configuration, whereby the dubitative function emerges after the cor-rective function in the case of elements originally participating in a scalar construction (al limite, al massimo, tutt'al più) while in the development of caso mai the simple dubitative function precedes the dubitative-corrective one.

This paper reports on the analysis of the use of indefinite article forms (a/an) in front of vowel sounds, as well as certain established and emerging invariant tags (yeah, innit, right, okay, you get me) in spoken London English. The study used the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LIC; Gabrielatos et al., forthcoming), a 1.3 million word corpus comprising the transcribed and marked-up interview data from the ESRC-funded project, Linguistic innovators: the English of adolescents in London (Kerswill et al. 2008), as well as the Corpus of London Teenage English (COLT) (Stenström et al. 2002). The research methodology combined approaches and techniques from sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. Variables were examined individually and in cross-tabulations, using both manual/semiautomated and automated techniques.

Globalisation and international mobility in the 21st century has led to the internationalisation of the English language (Crystal, 2003). Research regarding linguistic gains at university levels is however extremely scarce. This study aims to address this gap of knowledge and provide some answers as to how much linguistic gain can be expected after one year of English medium instruction. Two groups of undergraduate students enrolled in different levels of English medium instruction (EMI) were given a pre and post-test over a 1 year period. Results were analysed statistically; significant gains were found only in the semiimmersion group in the grammatical domain; although, there was a trend for improvement as well as higher scores for full immersion students. It might be interpreted that in order for linguistic gains to be seen in adults there needs to be some focus on form and language guidance (Muñoz, 2007; Pérez-Vidal, 2007). Thus, an integrated content and language (ICLHE) approach is more effective than a solely content based EMI model for university level content courses, if linguistic gains are the desired outcomes of the programme.