Semantic features of discursive markers in English and Azerbaijani languages

Abstract

The paper deals with the contrastive study of the semantic features of the discourse markers in the English and Azerbaijani fictional texts. It discusses various views of the researchers (D. Blakemore, T. Van Dijk, M. Hansen, Y. Maschler, D. Schiffrin, E. Chiglincheva, M. Kamenski) who extensively studied the semantic status of the discourse markers in English. The instances of the use of the discourse markers have strong correlation with communicative situation and the type of discourse. Defining the type of discourse clarifies other issues related to communicative situation. Discourse markers are key connecting devices between the parts of discourse motivated by the intention of the sender (author). Even the most complicated ideas can be shaped in discourse either explicitly or implicitly using discourse markers. Discourse markers are also quite common in Azerbaijani like in all other languages and they play very important role in the distribution of information in discourse. The results of our analysis suggests that the discourse markers in the languages under analysis have mostly common semantic features. The difference is that in contrast to English some discourse markers with the semantics of modality in Azerbaijani are formulated through the transformation of sentence and also the case suffixes can function as discourse markers in this language.