The Meta-pragmatic Functions of English Discourse Markers

Abstract

Abstract. Discourse markers are only a small group of words in English, but the study of discourse markers has become an interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research. This paper holds that discourse markers play a procedural role in the discourse, reveal the meta-pragmatic awareness of language users, and exert a series of meta-pragmatic functions. This paper extends a discussion and makes some conclusions to those meta-pragmatic functions. The Composition, the Names and the Definitions of Discourse MarkersAlthough discourse markers are a small group of words, they are prevalent in various languages. Researchers from different races and different countries have discussed them in diverse perspectives. Many scholars have extended wide research on them in the aspects of psychology, philosophy and linguistics, and the research angles have been shifted from the syntactic-pragmatic ones or the semantic-pragmatic ones to the pragmatic-cognitive ones.Discourse markers are few in English, mainly composed of interjections (well, oh, uh), adverbs (actually, incidentally, frankly), conjunctions ((and, therefore, however, but), phrases (As a consequence, in particular, you know, I mean, therefore), and clauses (according to, I think, I guess). However, since different researchers unfold their research from different angles, this small group of words has different names, such as logic connectors, particles, gambits, discourse operators, discourse markers, discourse signaling devices, pragmatic particles, pragmatic formatives, pragmatic function words, semantic conjuncts, disjunct markers, clue words, extra sentential links, hyperpropositional expressions, conversational routines, prefaces, phatic connectives, etc.. The difference of those terminologies reflects that different researchers undertake their research on this group of words from different angles in different ways, and that discourse markers have various discourse functions. At present, there is no consensus on which terminology can be used to generalize such group. In this paper, the terminology discourse markers is used to summarize them, because "This term appears to be the one with the greatest universality and the least applicability, and it allows us to include a large variety of words under a semantic concept".Additionally, different scholars give distinct definitions to discourse markers. Among them, Schiffrin, a well-known scholar who studies English discourse markers in depth, argues that discourse markers are "a set of functional, verbal (or non-verbal) tools that provide contextual assistance to ongoing discourses". And Levinson thinks that discourse markers are "undoubtedly the words or phrases that can indicate the relation of a discourse to the preceding discourse in English. Usually they show how the words reflect or continue to discuss certain parts of the former words in very complex ways. Redeker defines discourse markers as "a group of discourse operators that are universally used as coherent language markers in discourse". On the basis of Re...

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