Second-level discourse markers across languages

Abstract

This article looks at a particular type of routine formula, called ‘second-level discourse marker’ (SLDM), which falls within the scope of what is sometimes termed ‘procedural vocabulary’. Having defined and exemplified the notion, I set up a structural typology of SLDMs. I then proceed to discuss the possibility of structural equivalence between English, German and French SLDMs. I conclude by exploring the treatment accorded to SLDMs in some of the major bilingual dictionaries. The language material used for purposes of illustration is drawn from a wide variety of corpora.

‘OK, well, first of all, let me say …’: Discursive uses of response initiators in US presidential primary debates

“…Positioned before longer utterances, such ‘fixed phrases’ (Fischer, 2014: 273–274) enable speakers to lead the exchange in a new direction. In contrast to prototypical discourse markers, these longer collocations can also be categorized as ‘second-level discourse markers’, as they consist of two or more orthographic words yet behave like single functional units (Siepmann, 2005: 52). Some of them typically appear utterance-initially, such as a first point is that or let us first look at .…”

“…According to the influential approach by Jucker and Ziv (1998), a lexical item is closer to the prototypical core of the category discourse marker if it meets a set of specific criteria, such as tone group separation, syntactic periphery, little propositional meaning and stylistic marking as informal and colloquial (p. 3). In the past three decades, discourse markers have been investigated from various perspectives, such as grammaticalization (Brinton, 1996), coherence relations (Lenk, 1998), contrastive linguistics (Siepmann, 2005), English as a foreign language (Müller, 2005), modality (Fedriani and Sansó, 2017) and (dis)fluency (Crible, 2018). However, one basic premise that is shared by most studies is that the functions of discourse markers can be examined on both the textual and the interactional levels.…”

“…In the framework of Functional Grammar, this concept was further developed under the term ‘response initiator’ (Dik, 1997: 406), which emphasizes the occurrence of respective items in replies to questions. As implied by their name, response initiators invariantly appear at the beginning of conversational turns, although a number of them are identical with items known as ‘pragmatic markers’ (Brinton, 1996; Fedriani and Sansó, 2017), ‘discourse particles’ (Fischer, 2006) and ‘discourse markers’ (Crible, 2018; Jucker and Ziv, 1998; Müller, 2005; Schiffrin, 1987; Siepmann, 2005), which may also occur in other positions. Although most studies in this field refer to casual everyday discourse, a few publications have started to examine markers, such as ‘I mean’ in the institutionalized domain of political dialog (e.g.…”

Untitled

“…Interest in the study of the nature and characteristic features of spoken academic discourse in university setting started with the emergence of academic genres, such as seminars, conferences, workshops, or lectures. In recent decades lectures as a separate academic genre was explored by an array of researchers including Thompson (1994), Carter & McCarthy (1997), Biber (1999Biber ( , 2009, Bellés & Fortanet (2004), Lee (2009), Crawford Camiciottoli (2007Camiciottoli ( , 2021, Siepmann (2005), Hyland (2012), Barbieri (2013), Kashiha (2022) and many others who looked at lectures from diverse angles, as an 'oral academic genre' (Bellés & Fortanet, 2004), a 'pedagogical process genre' (e.g. Thompson 1994, Lee, 2009and Carter & McCarthy (1997, and as a 'pedagogical genre' or a 'pedagogic register' (Crawford Camiciottoli 2007).…”

Les marqueurs de discours polylexicaux en français scientifique

“…Les unités polylexicales à valeur discursive (Siepmann, 2001a(Siepmann, , 2001b(Siepmann, , 2005a, par contre, ont jusqu'à une date récente été traitées en parent pauvre de la recherche lexicographique, et cela malgré leur importance pour le rédacteur, qu'il soit ou non de langue maternelle française. Et elles ne sont pas assez présentes dans l'esprit des enseignants et des apprentis scripteurs.…”