Abstract
How do conversationalists manage to understand each other? Close analysis of British and American conversations (from the London-Lund-Corpus and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English) reveals clearly that we use structural items that reach beyond the scope of discourse markers as were analyzed by Schiffrin (1987). I call these global discourse markers because of their global orientation within the discourse. It seems that global discourse markers mostly occur at the beginning and at the end of digressions, as well as with topic shifts and topic drifts. In this paper, two of these items, however and still, are described in their structuring functions within ongoing discourse, and examples from the corpora are given, indicating that differences in global coherence strategies exist between the two large varieties of English.
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