Epistemic constraints on the use of discourse marker of course

Abstract

Concerning the use of of course, little research has been conducted to study what function it plays in a discourse nor to find a common thread going through its seemingly various functions such as an inferential marker (Fraser, 1999), a booster or emphasizer (Holmes, 1990), a content disjunct (Quirk et al., 1990), an assessive (Bach, 1999), an evidential marker (Furkó, 2007), etc. Since little have its linguistic contexts been studied, it is hard to tell what linguistic contexts are (in)compatible with it. The current study aims to investigate whether its various discourse functions can be reduced down to a single function, and how this single function is related to the politeness requirement when it occurs in a response to a yes-no question. Furthermore, it also aims to determine its semantics and what it has to do with the lack of its compatibility with questions. To this end, the current study tries to capture the single function of of course within the framework of dynamic semantics (Dekker, 2012; Groenendijk & Stokoff, 1991; Krifka, 2015; Veltman, 1996).