Research on discourse markers has run into fundamental difficulties recently. First, that group of linguistic items appears to withstand approaches trying to account for them in terms of formal properties, even though the set of discourse markers includes a subset, that of discourse particles, that is somewhat easier to characterise in formal terms. Secondly, a function-based description of discourse markers has its own problems, too: it is not easy to find the common denominator of all the diverse roles that the relevant literature attributes to them. A substantial part of the latter difficulty has its roots in the fact that, to date, no adequate and full-fledged classification has been proposed with respect to linguistic units having a pragmatic role, including discourse markers.No increase in the amount of empirical research does, in itself, present a way out of that situation: successful continuation of such research and general theoretical advancement both require that certain fundamental issues be clarified first. The purpose of this paper, accordingly, is to reveal certain difficulties in referring to and characterizing discourse markers (via a review of the relevant literature), claiming that some of their allegedly canonical properties are oversimplified or downright wrong. Also, an effort is made to highlight crucial functional aspects of the delimitation of the group of discourse markers and to discuss the status of multi-word discourse markers, too.Keywords: discourse marker, pragmatic marker, discourse particle, functional description, multi-word discourse marker * I wish to acknowledge the generous help I received in writing this paper from members of the Functional linguistics workshop of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and from the reviewers of this paper. I also wish to thank Mária Ladányi for the numerous pieces of advice and encouragement I received from her.
This study is the first attempt at detecting formal and positional characteristics of single-word simple discourse markers in a spontaneous speech sample of Hungarian. In the first part of the research, theoretical claims made in the relevant literature were tested. The data did not confirm or only partially confirmed the claims that Hungarian discourse markers (i) occur in turn-initial position and (ii) are prosodically independent, that is, are flanked by a pause on either side. In the second part, we looked at word forms both occurring as discourse markers and having syntactic functions in order to determine the features and cues which help us during speech perception to identify and distinguish between syntactic and discourse marking functions. The points of analysis were as follows: the position of the given word form in the clause, the degree of lenition in its articulation, the duration of the word form, the modulation of fundamental frequency, and the occurrence of sentence stress, if any, on the word form at hand. The results show that one or the other, or some combination, of these various factors may play a role in the perception process in certain instances only; this suggests that other parameters, yet to be explored, are also involved in the identification of these functions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.