к.ф.н. Шингарева М.Ю., магистрант Шукурбаева А.

Региональный социально-инновационный университет

To the Question of Discourse Markers Notion and Functions

Let’s start from the example of spoken conversation to consider then what discourse markers are as a category of linguistic items?

A: Right that comes to er seventy three eighty six. Thank you. Right I just need you to sign there.

B: Thank you.

A: Well the weather's turned up today anyway. B: Mm, it's nice isn't it. A: It's breezy though.

B: [laughs] Dick said it's been going on forever. He said it's been raining for about =

A: It's been raining, we had a snow blast, we had a snowstorm last weekend there.

B: Mm.

A: Amazing stuff.

B: Great. Thanks.

A: Good. I'll give you a receipt for that. There you go. B: Great. Thanks. Thank you. [1, p. 212]

Discourse markers can be defined according to form, position or function. With respect to form, discourse marking is carried out by a set of various words and phrases. These include right, well, great, good and there you go in the above exchange, as well as:

anyway, because (or cos), fine, good, great, like, now, oh, okay, so, now, then, and, but, so, you know, I mean, as I say, for a start, mind you

The set is by no means a fixed or clearly demarcated one. Firstly, linguists disagree over which words to include - Schiffrin [2], for example, suggests that discourse markers could also include paralinguistic features and non-verbal gestures, items which other linguists would not include. Secondly, we could argue that words not usually used as discourse markers can idiosyncratically be used as such, or that novel forms could emerge in new contexts. For example, I will go on to suggest that emoticons fulfil a similar role as other discourse markers in texting. Despite this flexibility and variability, however, there is a set of core and recognized forms that include those listed above.

Whether a word is classified as a discourse marker rests in part on its position in an utterance and on its use. Discourse markers tend to be positioned outside the clause; they are non-clausal elements.

Ultimately, however, discourse markers are best defined as a category by their functions. In general terms, discourse markers reflect a speaker's engagement with, and construction of, the unfolding interaction. In practical terms, this means that they are used by speakers to organize their talk. On the one hand, discourse markers link utterances and ideas together - that is, they organize the informational content carried in each clause - and, on the other, they indicate a speaker's position in relation to what is said and are used to monitor or direct the understanding of the listener - that is, they determine how what is said is to be understood by a speaker's interlocutors. As such, discourse markers play an interpersonal role in indicating formality and power relations between speakers and highlighting their evaluations of the interaction. More specifically, their functions include opening or closing interactions, sequencing interaction and marking topic boundaries and shifts, focusing attention and monitoring shared knowledge. So, what this means is that discourse markers operate on a number of levels: interpersonal (smoothing relations between interlocutors), referential (organizing the world through discourse), structural (organizing and sequencing the discourse) and cognitive (making cognitive processes explicit, verbalizing hesitations and doubts and so on) [3, pp. 414-415].

We have been talking about 'spoken' discourse markers and 'speakers', in part because of their different distributions across spoken and written varieties. Discourse markers such as so and now do of course occur in sentence-initial position as a normal feature of written texts, at least in some genres. However, even the use of these discourse markers is more restricted in written than in spoken texts. Other discourse markers - you see, you know, oh - occur much more frequently in spoken texts and are very rare in written texts. Where they do occur in writing, it appears that they are used as spoken discourse markers, in order to project a sense of orality or conversational intimacy into the written text. In other words, these discourse markers seem able to evoke speech.

McCarthy [4, p. 171] highlights a relevant distinction here, between medium (referring to 'how the message is transmitted') and mode ('how it is composed stylistically'). Crucial to this distinction is the fact that there exists a prototypically speech-like mode of communicating and a prototypically writing-like mode. (This McCarthy shows by asking people to label decontextualized extracts as having been spoken or written, which they do through recognition of stylistic features, including discourse markers.) However, there need not always be a convergence between a typical spoken mode and the spoken medium; or between the written mode and a written text. So, a written text may include varying numbers of speech-like features, and vice versa. (Although 'informants' in McCarthy's study tended to correctly identify extracts as being from texts that had originally been spoken, they were also happy with the idea that certain genres - literacy and advertising - would also use spoken discourse markers and they correctly identified these texts as written on the basis of other factors.) However, as we suggested above, where a written text contains discourse markers, it is often with the intention of purposefully evoking a conversational style (just as we shall see in texting).

One important point is that the use of spoken discourse markers in writing is not new; its use in online texts or in texting can be seen as an extension of practices that have always been engaged in by writers trying to engage with readers, or create the impression of engaging with them. McCarthy [4, p. 175] gives the following example of a written advert from The Guardian.

UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM OPPORTUNITIES IN SPACE: Well, not strictly in Space, but Space Research.

The first thing to note with respect to texting is that discourse markers typically associated with speech are used by texters - at least in CorTxt.

In other words, discourse markers in texting remain marked and meaningful features.

Various factors can be suggested to explain the preference in texting for certain discourse markers over others. Given the space constraints of a text message, one factor may be word or phrase length, and in support of this argument we can cite the infrequency of phrases such as I mean and you see (while I say did not occur at all) and the use of short words such as oh and okay. However, this argument hardly explains the frequent use of anyway in contrast to the infrequency of now. Another factor may be that the discourse markers used in texting tend to be involved in organizing and managing discourse, marking topic boundaries, focusing attention and diverting (oh, well, so, anyway), but not as much in monitoring the interlocutor's involvement and understanding (you know, you see). Again, although this may be a factor, it is not consistently deployed, given that sequence markers such as firstly are absent.

A third argument lies with the particular texters who contributed text messages to this corpus. It may be that those discourse markers frequently used in CorTxt are simply those which this group of texters tend to use more often in speech - an argument difficult to follow up without spoken data. A more compelling argument lies not so much in how this group uses discourse markers, but that these texters perceive and value certain discourse markers differently from others. I noted above that the transfer of discourse markers from speech to texting implies that texters are to varying extents aware of them (even if they could not voice this awareness or explain the feature) and that they perceive the markers to fulfil certain functions. So, a conscious or semi-conscious decision is being made whenever a texter uses a discourse marker, based on the fit between what the texter wishes to convey and the social meaning he or she feels the discourse marker carries.

Whether a texter uses a particular discourse marker may also be shaped by how they value the particular feature. If speakers negatively value a certain feature - such as the dropping of /h/s in British English or the dropping of /r/s in New York - then they are likely to avoid it in their own speech, criticize its use by others and/or distance themselves from it by denying that they use it. Although people may genuinely believe their denials, linguistic researchers often find that people use features in interview even as they deny using them.

Our point is that another way in which people might react to a negatively valued feature would be to avoid it in written forms of conversation, such as texting, and that this might explain the avoidance of you know and I see. Whether this holds up in relation to the infrequently or never-used discourse markers can only be determined by gauging the values of the texters in question.

The transfer of spoken features to the written medium implies a degree of conscious decision- making, and the choices made as to what features to use in texting and which to avoid are likely to be determined by texters' judgments regarding the function of the discourse marker and the way in which the item is valued - discourse markers associated with overly sloppy, uneducated or regional speech may be avoided.

Literature:

1. Carter, R. and M. McCarthy (2006) Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2. Schiffin, D. (1987) Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3. Fung, L. and R. Carter (2007) Discourse markers and spoken English: native and learner use in pedagogic settings, Applied Linguistics 28/3: 410-39.

4. McCarthy, M. (1993) 'Spoken discourse markers in written text', in Sinclair, J.M, M. Hoey and G. Fox (eds), Techniques of Description. London: Routledge, pp. 170-82.