Discourse markers

In a ground-breaking work building on ¨Ostman (1981), and Schourup (1985), among others, Schiffrin analyzed certain functions of and, because, but,

I mean, now, Oh!, or, so, then, well, y’know and showed that they can serve as

“discourse markers” (DMs) or “sequentially dependent elements which bracket elements of talk” (Schiffrin 1987: 31). Such brackets may function “locally” between contiguous utterances, without imposing a discourse hierarchy on those utterances, or “globally,” in which case they mark episodes, and impose a hierarchical structure (Schiffrin 1992, Solomon 1995). Schiffrin showed that such markers are not, as used to be claimed, “meaningless.” Their meanings may be hard to grasp (Longacre 1976 called them “mystery” particles), but they are essential to the rhetorical shape of any argument or narrative. While some of these pragmatic markers (e.g. y’know) are restricted to talk or highly colloquial representations of it, many are used in a variety of discourse types, including highly literate expository prose (e.g. in fact,

then). In Schiffrin (1990b) she showed how certain DMs, for example, then as in

(2), which is an excerpt from a conversational sequence on academic careers, can serve to express the speaker’s attitude to the sequential relationship between the preceding discourse and what is to come:

(2) The money part of it isn’t eh: anything, is it. [confirmation and elaboration by addressee]

Oh I see. And then say you wanna get married. Cause it makes it hard. (Schiffrin 1987: 253) Here then looks back anaphorically to prior discourse and forward cataphorically to upcoming discourse (in this case that of the addressee, as well as her own), marking it as a subtopic within the larger topic of academic careers. In other words, it is “discourse deictic” (Schiffrin 1990b). It also “creates a bridge” (Schiffrin 1987: 253) from prior discourse time to immediately upcoming discourse time, while primarily serving not a temporal function but a discourse function of bracketing off subtopics as members of a list.

It is the subset of pragmatic markers that create a bridge pointing both backwards and forwards, whether at a local level (as in (2)) or at a global episodic level that has now come to be defined as discourse markers (DMs). For example, referring to spoken discourse, Fraser characterized them as follows: “[DM’s] signal a comment specifying the type of sequential discourse relationship that holds between the

current utterance – the utterance of which the discourse marker is a part – and the prior discourse” (Fraser 1988: 21–22); “They are expressions which signal a relationship across rather than within utterances, and contribute to the coherence of the discourse” (Fraser and Malamud-Makowski 1996: 864). Because DMs are pragmatic markers signaling local connectivity that connect individual utterances in ways that are anaphoric and cataphoric at the utterance level (Blakemore 1987), they are to be distinguished from what have been called “speech act adverbials” (Swan 1988) or “stance adverbs” (Biber and Finegan 1988), such as frankly in:

(3) Frankly, I didn’t enjoy that movie at all.

Like many DMs, stance adverbs make explicit the attitude with which SP/W claims to utter or write what follows. However, unlike DMs, they do not link back directly to a prior utterance. Contrast:

(4) In fact, I did not enjoy that movie at all. where the DM in fact evokes a prior comment.

Even though utterances marked by local DMs need not be adjacent, there must be some immediate relationship of the content of an utterance p to a subsequent utterance q in terms of condition, cause, justification, elaboration (e.g. additiv- ity), contrast (adversativity), topic shift (for some typologies of clause types, see Lehmann 1988, Matthiessen and Thompson 1988). By contrast, DMs signaling global connectivity connect larger chunks of discourse, and impose hierarchy on the sequence, typically a narrative one.

DMs are clearly subjective and procedural in that they indicate SP/W’s rhetorical, metatextual, stance towards the cohesiveness of the discourse being developed – elaboration of or counter-argument to what preceded, continuation of or change in topic, background, or foreground in narrative. In addition they also often convey conviction, uncertainty, or unwillingness to take responsibility for the truth of what is said, etc. (Brinton 1996), and are in that broad sense modal. Some are oriented almost completely to the speaker and the rhetorical strategy being engaged in, e.g.

indeed, in fact. Others are more intersubjective in that they have the double function

of signaling the type of rhetorical strategy being used (so may signal “Listen up: I am going to start the expected discourse”), and at the same time expressing concern for the addressee’s “face” – these are usually called “hedges,” or “mitigators” and are exemplified by some uses of well, actually, y’know, and in earlier Eng., hwæt. Brinton (1996) discusses how hwæt in verse2_{is typically followed by information}

about the poet or quoted interlocutor’s sources; it signals that what follows is to be 2 _{Its occurrence in prose is less frequent than in the poetry but, according to Brinton, its function}

regarded as part of the shared knowledge, or common ground, of poet and audience, and it makes explanatory material salient. Alternatively, when hwæt is addressed to a second person, it may serve as a reminder of what has been said, or of something that is evident or generally true (Brinton 1996: chapter 7). An example is:

(5) Hwæt! Ic ysne sang si geomor fand what I this song travel-weary found on seocum sefan, samnode wide. with sick mind gathered widely

“What!, I, weary of travel, discovered this song, with a sick mind gathered (it) widely.”

(c.1000 Fates of the Apostles, 1–2 [Brinton 1996: 182]) This hwæt appears to have originated from the interrogative pronoun of the same form, perhaps in a process that we can recapture from the rise in MdE of Know

what?, which also serves an attention-getting, intersubjective function.

Many discourse markers occur in syntactically marginal positions in the clause; whether it is the right or the left margin depends in part on the word order of the language in question. In Eng. they tend to occur on the left margin (though they can occur in other places as well); in Jp. they may be on the right or the left. In other languages such as Gk. they occur in what is often referred to as “Wackernagel’s position,” as the second element of the clause.

DMs are highly language-specific in their distribution and function. But never- theless there seem to be quite similar paths of development at the macro-level. When their histories are accessible to us, they typically arise out of conceptual meanings and uses constrained to the argument structure of the clause. Over time, they not only acquire pragmatic meanings (which typically coexist for some time with earlier, less pragmatic, meanings) but also come to have scope over propositions. If they link discourses on a hierarchically similar level, i.e. if they function at the local level, they can be called “connectives.” They may also come to have global functions, marking larger structures, for example episode units in narrative (e.g. then), or, in conversation, conversational turns (e.g. so). Some may not require any prior dis- course, or at least no obviously connected one. For example, so may be used to start a meeting, to introduce a speaker, etc. In this use it serves as an attention-getter and a signal that the speaker has something to say of import to the discourse expectations. We will illustrate the development of DM indeed in English, and follow that by a brief discussion of two similar, but, we will show, rather different DMs: actually and in fact.3 _{We then go on to summarize work on the history of well (Jucker}

1997), which illustrates the development of a primarily intersubjective DM. Finally 3 _{Thanks to Lisbeth Lipari, who first made the history of in fact exciting territory for Elizabeth}

we turn to the history of Japanese sate “thus,” which acquired episode marker functions similar to well (then), so.

4.3 The development of discourse markers signaling