On the Importance of the Multimodal Approach to Discourse Markers

Abstract

Discourse markers (DMs) are pragmatic devices, which operate beyond the traditional word or phrase classification and have little to no effect on the propositional meaning. They have significant functions with regard to organising ongoing discourse by linking discourse segments, illustrating the current discourse structure to the interlocutors. Recent studies have discovered that DMs are truly multifunctional and thus play communicative roles at different dimensions simultaneously, ranging from managing discourse by denoting the speaker’s attitude, monitoring turn-taking activities to prompting the shared-knowledge between interlocutors. Nevertheless, few attentions have been paid on the fact that human communication is multimodal, wherein discourse includes both spoken language and gestures. Most DM studies predominantly investigate the use of DMs in text-based frameworks and therefore do not do justice to the non-linguistic DM functions, which are not easily amenable to text descriptions. The goal of this paper is to draw attention to this gap from the pragmatic perspective on DMs, demonstrating the importance of multimodal approaches to the study area.