Cover not available
Part of
Outside the Clause: Form and function of extra-clausal constituents
Edited by Gunther Kaltenböck, Evelien Keizer and Arne Lohmann
[Studies in Language Companion Series 178] 2016
► pp. 417–446

Aspects of discourse marker sequencing

Empirical challenges and theoretical implications

| University of Vienna
| University of New Mexico

In research on Discourse Markers (DMs) it has long been noted that DMs frequently occur in sequences, e.g., oh well or you know I mean. Despite the ubiquity of this phenomenon and occasional citations of examples in studies on individual DMs, the combinatory behavior of DMs has received only limited attention as a theoretically relevant phenomenon in its own right. This chapter provides an overview of the phenomenon that synthesizes the results of prior research, complemented with new analyses of our own. We separately address two different aspects of DM sequencing. The first is the question of co-occurrence of DMs, that is, which DMs combine frequently with one another. The second aspect concerns the ordering of DMs when occurring in sequence. In discussing the results of empirical studies of both of these aspects we outline what research on DMs and the structure of the clause periphery stands to gain from studying DM sequences.

Published online: 3 October 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.178.14loh
References
Aijmer, Karin
2002 English Discourse Particles: Evidence from a Corpus [Studies in Corpus Linguisics 10]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004 Pragmatic markers in spoken interlanguage. Nordic Journal of English Studies 3(1): 173–190.Google Scholar
2011  Well I’m not sure I think… The use of well by non-native speakers. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16(2): 231-254. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Andersen, Gisle
2001 Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation. In A Relevance-theoretic Approach to the Language of Adolescents [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 84]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Auer, Peter & Günthner, Susanne
2005 Die Entstehung von Diskursmarkern im Deutschen – ein Fall von Grammatikalisierung? In Grammatikalisierung im Deutschen [Linguistik - Impulse und Tendenzen 9], Torsten Leuschner, Tanja Mortelmans & Sarah de Groodt (eds), 335-362. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Becker, Alton J
1988 Language in particular: A lecture. In Linguistics in Context: Lectures from the 1985 LSA/TESOL and NEH Institutes, Deborah Tannen (ed.), 17-35, Norwood NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Bouma, Gerlof
2009 Normalized (pointwise) mutual information in collocation extraction. In Von der Form zur Bedeutung: Texte automatisch verarbeiten / From Form to Meaning: Processing Texts Automatically, Proceedings of the Biennial GSCL Conference 2009, Chiarcos, Eckart de Castilho & Stede (eds), 31–40. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Brizuela, Maquela, Andersen, Elaine & Stallings, Lynne
1999 Discourse markers as indicators of register. Hispania 82(1): 128–141. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cieri, Christopher, Graff, David, Kimball, Owen, Miller, Dave & Walker, Kevin
2004a Fisher English Training Speech, Part 1: Transcripts. Philadelphia PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
2004b Fisher English Training Speech, Part 1: Speech. Philadelphia PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
2005a Fisher English Training Speech, Part 2: Transcripts. Philadelphia PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
2005b Fisher English Training Speech, Part 2: Speech. Philadelphia PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H
2002 Speaking in time. Speech Communication 36: 5-13. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cuenca, Maria-Josep & Marín, Maria-Josep
2009 Co-occurrence of discourse markers in Catalan and Spanish oral narrative. Journal of Pragmatics 41(5): 899–914. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cutler, Anne
1983 Speakers’ conceptions of the functions of prosody. In Prosody: Models and Measurements, Anne Cutler & D. Robert Ladd (eds), 80–91. Heidelberg: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
D'Arcy, Alexandra Faith
2005 Like: Syntax and Development. PhD Dissertation. Toronto.Google Scholar
Diani, Giuliana
2004 The discourse functions of I don’t know in English conversation. In Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 120], Karin Aijmer & Anna-Brita Stenström (eds), 151-171. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Kerstin
(ed.) 2006 Approaches to Discourse Particles. Oxford: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Flores-Ferrán, Nydia
2014 So pues entonces: An examination of bilingual discourse markers in Spanish oral narratives of personal experience of New York City-born Puerto Ricans. Sociolinguistic Studies 8 (1): 57–83. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fraser, Bruce
1999 What are discourse markers? Journal of Pragmatics 31: 931–952. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009 An account of discourse markers. International Review of Pragmatics 1(2): 293-320. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 The sequencing of contrastive discourse markers in English. Baltic Journal of the English Language, Literature, and Culture 1: 29-35.Google Scholar
2013 Combinations of contrastive discourse markers in English. International Review of Pragmatics 5: 318–340. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gansner, Emden R., Koutsofios, Eleftherios, North, Stephen C. & Vo, Kiem-Phong
1993 A technique for drawing directed graphs. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 19(3): 214–230. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gansner, Emden R. & Koutsofios, Eleftherios
2006 Drawing Graphs with Dot: Dot's User's Manual. [URL]>
Haselow, Alexander
2011 Discourse marker and modal particle: The functions of utterance-final then in spoken English. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 3603-3623. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heine, Bernd, Kaltenböck, Gunther, Kuteva, Tania & Haiping Long
2013 An outline of discourse grammar In Reflections on Functionalism in linguistics, Bischoff, Shannon & Carmen Jeny (eds), 155-206. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar
Hirschberg, J. & Litman, D
1993 Empirical studies on the disambiguation of cue phrases. Computational Linguistics 19: 501-530.Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul
1991 On some principles of grammaticalization. In Approaches to Grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 19(1)], Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds) 17-35. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hutchinson, Ben
2003 Automatic classification of discourse markers on the basis of their co-occurrences. In Proceedings of the ESSLLI Workshop The Meaning and Implementation of Discourse Particles , Manfred Stede & Henk Zeevat (eds), 1-8. Nancy.
Knott, Alistair
1996 A Data-driven Methodology for Motivating a Set of Coherence Relations. PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Koops, Christian & Lohmann, Arne
2015 A quantitative approach to the grammaticalization of discourse markers: Evidence from their sequencing behavior. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20(2): 232-259. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lee-Goldman, Russell
2011  No as a discourse marker. Journal of Pragmatics 43(10): 2627–2649. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levelt, William & Cutler, Anne
1983 Prosodic marking in speech repair. Journal of Semantics 2: 205-217. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maschler, Yael
1994 Metalanguaging and discourse markers in bilingual conversation. Language in Society 23(3): 325–366. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Müller, Simone
2005 Discourse Markers in Native and Non-native English Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 138]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Murray, Dinah
1979 Well. Linguistic Inquiry 10(4): 727- 32.Google Scholar
Norrick, Neal R
2010 Interjections as pragmatic markers. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 866–891. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oates, Sarah Louise
2000 Multiple discourse marker occurrence: Creating hierarchies for Natural Language. In Proceedings of the 3rd CLUK Colloquium , Brighton, 41-45.
2001 Multiple Discourse Marker Occurrence: Creating Hierarchies for Natural Language Generation. MA dissertation, University of Brighton.Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo & Baayen, Harald
2009 Suffix ordering and morphological processing. Language 85(1): 109–152. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Redeker, Gisela
1991 Linguistic markers of discourse structure. Linguistics 29: 1139–1172.Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah
1987 Discourse Markers. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2001 Discourse markers: Language, meaning, and context. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen & Heidi E. Hamilton (eds), 54-75. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Schourup, Lawrence
1999 Discourse markers. Tutorial overview. Lingua 107: 227–265. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2001 Rethinking well . Journal of Pragmatics 33: 1025-1060. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, Sara & Jucker, Andreas
2002 Discourse markers as turns. In Rethinking Sequentiality: Linguistics meets Conversational Interaction, Anita Fetzer & Christiane Meierkord (eds), 151-178. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Struckmaier, Volker
2014  Ja doch wohl C? Modal particles in German as C-related elements. Studia Linguistica 68(1): 16–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A
2016 Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logo
Thurmaier, Maria
1991 Combinatorial regularities for modal particles and their use as an instrument of analysis. Multilingua 10(1-2): 19–42.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
1997 The role of the development of discourse markers in a theory of grammaticalization. Paper presented at ICHL XII, Manchester, UK, 2005.
Vicher, Anne & Sankoff, David
1989 The emergent syntax of pre-sentential turn openings. Journal of Pragmatics 13: 81–97. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Waltereit, Richard
2007 À propos de la genèse diachronique des combinaisons de marqueurs. L’exemple de bon ben et enfin bref . Langue Francaise 154: 94–109.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 13 other publications

Abraham, Werner
2020. Modality in Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics, DOI logo
Bourgeois, Samuel
2022. “Oh yeah, one more thing: It’s gonna be huge.”. In Broadening the Spectrum of Corpus Linguistics [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 105], ► pp. 196 ff. DOI logo
Dobrego, Aleksandra, Alena Konina & Anna Mauranen
2023. Continuous speech segmentation by L1 and L2 speakers of English: the role of syntactic and prosodic cues. Language Awareness 32:3 ► pp. 487 ff. DOI logo
Haselow, Alexander
2020. Chapter 8. Local and global structures in discourse and interaction. In Grammar and Cognition [Human Cognitive Processing, 70], ► pp. 267 ff. DOI logo
Heine, Bernd, Tania Kuteva & Haiping Long
2020. Chapter 2. Dual process frameworks on reasoning and linguistic discourse. In Grammar and Cognition [Human Cognitive Processing, 70], ► pp. 59 ff. DOI logo
Izutsu, Katsunobu & Mitsuko Narita Izutsu
2020. Chapter 5. Dichotomous or continuous?. In Grammar and Cognition [Human Cognitive Processing, 70], ► pp. 159 ff. DOI logo
Izutsu, Katsunobu & Mitsuko Narita Izutsu
2021. Chapter 3. Presentation followed by negotiation. In Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 325], ► pp. 77 ff. DOI logo
Kazemian, Reza & Mohammad Amouzadeh
2022. Aspects ofvæ(‘and’) as a discourse marker in Persian. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 32:4 ► pp. 588 ff. DOI logo
Lewis, Diana M.
2021. Chapter 13. Pragmatic markers at the periphery and discourse prominence. In Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 325], ► pp. 351 ff. DOI logo
Ranger, Graham
2018. Chapter 8. ‘I think’. In Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality [Studies in Language Companion Series, 197], ► pp. 165 ff. DOI logo
Shirtz, Shahar
2024. Discourse markers as the locus of signaling the main-event line in Alsea narratives. Linguistics 62:1 ► pp. 229 ff. DOI logo
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2023. Chapter 4. On the rise of a marker of disaffiliation from Others’ discourse. In Reconnecting Form and Meaning [Studies in Language Companion Series, 230], ► pp. 99 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. Discourse Structuring Markers in English [Constructional Approaches to Language, 33], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.