Discourse marker

Usage in English

Common discourse markers used in the English language include you know, actually, basically, like, I mean, okay and so. Discourse markers come from varied word classes, such as adverbs (well) or prepositional phrases (in fact). The process that leads from a free construction to a discourse marker can be traced back through grammaticalization studies and resources. Discourse markers can be seen as a "joint product" of grammaticalization and cooption, explaining both their grammatical behavior and their metatextual properties.

Traditionally, some of the words or phrases that were considered discourse markers were treated as fillers or expletives: words or phrases that had no function at all. Now they are assigned functions in different levels of analysis: topic changes, reformulations, discourse planning, stressing, hedging, or backchanneling.

Yael Maschler divided discourse markers into four broad categories: interpersonal, referential, structural, and cognitive.

• Interpersonal markers are used to indicate the relationship between the speaker and the listener.
  • Perception: look, believe me
  • Agreement: exactly, or disagreement: I'm not sure
  • Amazement: wow
• Referential markers, usually conjunctions, are used to indicate the sequence, causality, and coordination between statements.
  • Sequence: now, then
  • Causality: because
  • Coordination: and, or non-coordination: but
• Structural markers indicate the hierarchy of conversational actions at the time in which they are spoken. These markers indicate which statements the speaker believes to be most or least important.
  • Organization: first of all
  • Introduction: so
  • Summarization: in the end
• Cognitive markers reveal the speaker's thought process
  • Processing information: uhh
  • Realization: oh!
  • Rephrasing: I mean

In her book on discourse analysis, Barbara Johnstone called discourse markers that are used by speakers to take the floor (like so) "boundarymarking uses" of the word. This use of discourse markers is present and important in both monologue and dialogue situations.