6. Reformulating and concluding

While it is primarily a reformulator, the Croatian discourse marker dakle also has several other functional pragmatic ingredients. Dedaic considers these elements in her attempt to both give a unitary account of this discourse marker and to tease out, in a comparative analysis, whether particles from different languages might share some common elements. In a unitary account of dakle (‘consequently’, ‘then’, ‘therefore’, ‘so’, ‘in other words’) as a discourse marker whose properties are of a primarily non-conceptual and highly multifunctional nature, Dedaic finds that its linguistic form contributes to the inferential processes involved in utterance understanding by making the causative-resultative relationship between the preceding and following discourse segments explicit. Furthermore, dakle seems to have developed two more functions in discourse – argumentative/rhetorical and attitudinal.