Discourse Markers Research Articles

The Pragmatic Functions of High-Frequency Discourse Marker So in Chinese EFL Teacher Talk

Discourse markers have multiple pragmatic functions and have significant influences on classroom organization and teaching. This study aims to analyze the pragmatic functions of discourse marker so in a self-built corpus of Chinese middle school English classroom discourse. The corpus analysis shows that discourse marker so has various pragmatic functions, including marking results and inferences, managing topics, summarizing, rewording and giving examples at the textual level. Besides, at the interactional level, so functions as a marker of speech acts such as questions, requests, opinions, elicitations and confirmations. The research shows that discourse marker so can make classroom discourse more closely linked, promote students’ understanding of teacher’s discourse and create a harmonious classroom atmosphere. The findings of this research might have important implications for English teaching and teachers’ professional development in middle schools.

СПЕЦИФИКА ИСПОЛЬЗОВАНИЯ ДИСКУРСИВНЫХ МАРКЕРОВ В ТЕКСТАХ SMS-СООБЩЕНИЙ НА СИНГАПУРСКОМ ВАРИАНТЕ АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА

The problem of studying discourse markers as a functional class of linguistic units became the important area of the 1970–80s that linguists focused on. However, to date, this area of linguistics has still been insufficiently explored and it raises a number of questions. The relevance of this study is explained by the global changes in the literary language, accompanied by the appearance of metacommunicative elements in the discourse. The novelty of this work is determined by its main purpose, which is to analyze the functioning of discourse markers in SMS texted in Singapore English. As a result, words classified as discourse markers are identified in our research based on the SMS from the NUS SMS corpus. These lexical units were determined as discourse markers in connection with their functions of expressing the sender's emotional and evaluative attitude to the context of the message.

La prosodie des marqueurs discursifs

This study aims at examining the possibility of lexicalisation of the prosody of discourse markers, with in mind the idea that it could serve as a criterion for distinguishing this category of items. The wide sample of examples we have been examining lead us to believe that this is indeed the case and that discourse markers – due to the process of grammaticalization they undergo – break free from phrasal constraints and can thus exhibit specific and distinguishable melodic patterns that are transversal across the entire paradigm and essentially linked to the expression of an attentional or thymic dimension.

Éclats de voix et marqueurs du discours

The aim of this article is to open a dialogue between linguistic pragmatics and praxematics on the theoretical problem of categorising heterogeneous signifiers as Discourse markers. We study certain features of the formation and placement of onomatopoeic and vowel interjections in order to reconsider them as an explanatory matrix for the functions shared with Discourse markers. Their metapraxemic foundation accounts for the contextual and sequential dimension of their mode of meaning.

Marcadores del discurso de cita directa en corpus españoles del PRESEEA: estratificación social y distribución diatópica

The aim of this paper is to carry out a study on the social behavior and diatopic distribution of direct quotation markers considering data from PRESEEA-Spain oral corpus. On the one hand, from a sociolinguistic perspective, we will focus on the relation of the use of these discursive units with criteria such as sex, age, and educational level; and, on the other hand, we will consider their productivity in the samples of each city studied. As general results, the presence of different discourse markers (pues, o sea, en plan, etc.) that introduce direct quotation has been observed, a function linked to the initial position they occupy in the utterance. Furthermore, the geolectal difference is evidenced not only in quotation markers that are of exclusive use in some urban areas of Spain, but also in the stratification patterns according to social criteria.

Sachant que : un marqueur (plus ou moins juste) de mémoire sémanticodiscursive

A construction with epistemic value, sachant que is a discourse marker that covers both semantic-logical and discursive-argumentative values. Our paper sets out to follow the behaviour of this marker through a heterogeneous corpus, from the point of view of textual typology (literary texts, everyday discourse) but also in specialised language, and more specifically legal language (written and oral). The interest in analysing this marker lies in the fact that its uses, which are very frequent in contemporary French, tend to diluteitsinitialepistemic value,which refers to a known content shared by the enunciative instances. Our analysis follows the mechanism of weakening or maintaining thesemantic and argumentativeforce of this discursive unit through various types of discourse, in order to identify the correct use of the word in approprithrough various types of discourse, in order to identify the correct use of the word in appropriate contexts and with the appropriate meaning.

Verbes parenthétiques et micro-diachronie

Our paper explores the description of parenthetical verbs in Port-Royal Logique. We place the description within the logical and grammatical model of this period of the grammatical history, notably by taking into account the notions of point of view, affirmation and assent. The exploration allows us to define a new approach to discourse markers in general. We show that their description does not respond to a formal and grammatical approach, but to a logical and rhetorical one. We conclude our analysis by looking at contemporary grammars to the Logique. We show that they do identify discourse markers, but choose not to analyse them, as their approach is more formal than logical.

НАУКОВІ ДИСКУРСИ ПРОФЕСОРА ФЛОРІЯ БАЦЕВИЧА

The article outlines the main research ideas of Professor Florij Batsevych, which have become relevant in modern communicative studies, linguistic pragmatics, and linguistic narratology. The analysis is made in accord with the main spheres of Professor’s studies: the research of estranged artistic texts, literary prosaic texts of Ukrainian and foreign authors, oral speech and memorata, research on text theory and textdiscursive categories, and discursive markers. The authors of the article focus on the integrity of the linguist’s scientific conception, which is manifested in the interrelationships of the multifaceted research on text, discourse, speech genre, in the development of new scientific directions in linguistics, and the search for scientific perspectives. Prospective innovations in Florij Batsevych’s scientific output, which represent the study of language/speech in the communicative-cognitive paradigm, are analyzed and reveal the linguist’s own theoretical views and their practical implementation on various language material. Among other Professor’s ideas, it is worth mentioning the development of deviatology as a linguistic-pragmatic sub-discipline, keen interest to texts created in altered states of consciousness, absurd texts, texts as the reflection of some traumatic experience, family communication, etc.; particular attention is paid to minor but important elements of discursive-pragmatic speech organization (e.g., particles, which he classifies as discourse markers) because classical structuralist approach to their investigation, in F. Batsevych’s point of view, does not reveal all the value of these components in the creation of new senses. The authors conclude that the specificity of Professor’s scientific output lies in the nature of his view on language and its research – anthropocentricity and humanism.

Unveiling Subjectivity in Press Discourse: A Statistical and Qualitative Study of Manually Annotated Articles

This article presents the results of an annotation experiment involving 36 participants tasked with rating the subjectivity of 150 excerpts from Belgian French press articles and with identifying linguistic indicators of subjectivity in the excerpts. We first explore inter-annotator agreement and correlations between the annotation results and the variables associated with the articles, then perform qualitative analysis of a sample of annotated texts. We introduce “textual heat maps”, a convenient method to visualize the results of the token-level annotations. The study reveals that the perception of subjectivity in text varies among readers, but that some tokens are widely considered as indicators of subjectivity. While expected indicators such as sentiment words and expressive punctuation were found to influence interpretations, less established markers such as discourse markers and modal verbs also played a role. The use of the pronoun on was identified as a significant subjectivity indicator, despite its common use to conceal the author’s presence in journalistic writing. These findings offer insights into subjectivity in journalistic discourse and have significant implications for the field of journalism and for the improvement of automated models for subjectivity detection.

Autour des locutions ma foi et ma parole : nuances dans l’engagement du locuteur ?

"This study focuses on two locutions, ma foi and ma parole, which are often presented as supporting an assertion and conveying the speaker’s commitment. However, they are very rarely commutable. In this work, we attempt to identify the criteria that guide and limit their role in discourse, firstly through a distributional analysis of the possibilities of the two locutions in autonomous use, and then through a semantic-pragmatic approach to the constraints gov- erning their appearance. Finally, we ask whether it is possible to classify them as interjections or as discourse markers."

Analysis on the Pragmatic Functions of Chinese Discourse Marker “haojiahuo”

“好家伙” (haojiahuo) as the network buzzword in 2020 has been widely used both online and offline. The study attempts to make an analysis of how and why people use the discourse marker “好家伙” from the adaptation-pragmatic perspective. Through analyzing the blogs collected from Weibo, it is found that people use “好家伙” on Weibo as a means of adaptation to contexts consisting of communicative and linguistic contexts. To be more specific, language user employs “好家伙” as a dynamic process to adapt to the mental, social and physical world as well as specific linguistic contexts. As a result, the functions of “好家伙” in the adaptation process can be summarized as follows: managing topics, constructing discourse, expressing emotions, filing speech blanks and mitigating face threats. The first two are discourse functions, and the last three belong to interpersonal functions.

Actualization of linguistic markers in political Internet discourse, and its peculiarities in the context of artificial neural network operation, and hate speech detection

The article argues that the actualization of linguistic markers (lexical, grammatical, pragmatic, semantic) in the texts of political Internet discourse is crucial for understanding the context (social, emotional, modal, etc.) in them. It is emphasized that the use of innovative tools (in particular, artificial neural networks) is in line with the trends towards the integration of the mathematical paradigm into the humanities, which is manifested in the latter’s tendency to the humanities digital sciences, affective computing, etc. It is noted that the use of the outlined innovative tools creates the need to take into account an integrated approach to such research, which is manifested in the integration of the methodology of other (primarily related) sciences, which, in turn, will allow to take into account contextual determination, cultural features (gaps, realities, etc.), as well as to use the full potential of artificial neural networks in modern linguistic research. The author emphasizes the need to further develop the originality of the use of the latter in such studies: developing datasets, building a training algorithm, testing and retraining (if necessary), as well as integrating different layers into their structures and optimizing such a structure specifically for linguistic research (which combinations are productive and why, for what purpose, etc.) The author emphasizes the originality of the use of innovative tools (deep learning, machine learning, artificial neural networks) to deal with hate speech, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda, which can take the form of sarcasm, irony, and absurdity in political Internet discourse, which requires further research and development of a new methodology to accurately identify such data and produce an inclusive and safe Internet environment.

Marqueurs de discours et rasoir d’Ockham

Most studies of discourse markers aim to establish a typology of uses for the unit under consideration. Authors seek to identify distinctive properties that characterize each use, and propose a more or less detailed semantic description for each one. In this article, we propose a critical analysis of the assumptions underlying this “taxonomic” approach to semantic description, and propose instead an “explanatory” approach based on the notion of “gloss”.

The Pragmatic Function of the Discourse Marker “Bu shi wo shuo”

The Pragmatic Function of the Discourse Marker “Bu shi wo shuo”

De ce qui est juste à ce qui est juste de dire dans comme de raison

The article proposes an approach to the types of functioning and mechanisms of change intervening in the rise of the discourse marker comme de raison in French, associated with evidentiality. The diachronic analysis provides the opportunity to study the relationship between comme de raison and the meanings of raison, but also the type of structure at the origin of the discourse marker. The status of the construction will be questioned, which is intertwined with the discussion about the mechanism of change (lexicalization, grammaticalization / pragmaticalization, cooptation). The semantic evolution could be described as follows: from « what is normal, right to do, what should be done » to « what is normal, right to say, what should be said », since this could be inferred from a previous sentence or a more general context.

A Comparative Study of Discourse Markers “Sheizhidaone” and “Who Knows” in Chinese and English

A Comparative Study of Discourse Markers “Sheizhidaone” and “Who Knows” in Chinese and English

The Confirmative Stance and Communicative Value of a Chinese Discourse Marker

The Confirmative Stance and Communicative Value of a Chinese Discourse Marker

Rôle de l’ethos et de ses marqueurs dans l’organisation discursive

This work aims at studying the notion of ethos using a semantic-pragmatic approach that allows us to reflect on how and why such a notion came into being. The aim is to identify the reasons why any individual, in interaction with his fellow human beings, may be led to elaborate and project a certain image of himself. At the root of these reasons lies a basic notion: the linguistic community, which in our view represents the hinge linking the why and the how and enables us to understand the general mechanism at work in the construction of ethos. We also propose the analysis of discourse markers by considering their importance in the projection of an ethos.

Awareness of Discourse Features in Teaching Writing Skills

Cohesion is deemed an indispensable component of writing, contributing to both the organisation of texts as well as the reader’s comprehension of the content. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the utilisation of discourse features in the academic writing of students. It specifically focuses on the cohesive devices employed by students and their level of awareness regarding cohesion and coherence. The research was conducted in the Dhanbad district, with a particular emphasis on technical students studying English for specific purposes. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the topic, this study also reviewed and analysed previous research that explored the usage of cohesive devices and the relationship between cohesion frequency and high-quality writing. This background research provided valuable insights into the existing body of knowledge and helped establish a foundation for the present study. The data analysis demonstrates that students possess the ability to incorporate various cohesive devices into their writing, indicating their awareness of discourse features. However, their usage is somewhat limited due to a restricted repertoire of discourse markers, which affected the range and diversity of cohesive devices employed in their writing. Overall, the paper sheds light on the significance of cohesion in academic writing, emphasising its role in organising texts and facilitating reader comprehension. It highlights the current state of students’ awareness and usage of cohesive devices in their writing, providing valuable insights for educators and curriculum developers to enhance students’ proficiency in this area.

Les marqueurs de discours

Although a common topic for some time, the idea of discourse markers has been hampered by the difficulty of providing an operative definition to the corresponding notion, in view of the very heterogeneous nature of the linguistic entities at stake. Starting from the different parameters regularly evoked in the study of such markers, this work aims at characterizing them as a class of operators likely to assume various functions according to their syntactic and/or semantic links within the discourse.