к.ф.н. Шингарева М.Ю., магистрант Чучуладзе М.И.

Региональный социально-инновационный университет

Discourse markers: theoretical background of question study

Initial interest in discourse markers (DMs) dates back to 1970s. Robert E. Longacre (1976) is considered to be the first among many who examined group of words that seem mysteriously meaningless at the first glance. He considered them as salt and pepper that give flavor to the text (Longacre: 1976). In line with this analogy, using a plenty of DMs in talk make it taste salty and spicy; using them less than needed, then we have a unflavoured conversation. It has been suggested that skilful use of DMs in talk is important indicator of competency to determine native speakership (see Wierzbicka (1991), Lindsey (1998)). After all, it seems that having adequate amount of DMs in ordinary conversation is the reason that make it run smoothly and comprehensibly.

Observing any ordinary conversation might gives us some clues about the way DMs are employed by their users. The trouble with this kind of observation is that we may find ourselves in numerous contexts that is possible for a piece of conversation to happen. In return, this may lead to miss the chances to monitor DMs to their full capacity and disregard some of their potentialities in organizing discourse.

Limiting the examination to certain contexts seems to give more fruitful insights on DMs. The hypotheses here is that DMs are used more effectively in certain contexts like news interviews as they accomplish various interaction goals. However, it should be mentioned that uses of DMs in news interviews is not considered to be different from of ordinary conversations. Rather, I believe investigating them in news interviews illuminates many interactional values of DMs that are not attended for different reasons in ordinary conversation.

The main propose of this article is to discuss the special cases of DMs in news interviews. It is distinctly occupied with how participants in news interviews use three DMs of ‘well’, ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’.

To begin with the DM well is one of the most investigated DMs that has its origin in other types of word class and has not been studied properly in the context of news interview with prosodic and other contextual features. Among many, there are certain functions that make this DM important in news interviews. It is believed that the DM well is employed to minimize confrontation and face-threat (see Owen, (1981), Watts (1986)) and suggest insufficient answer (see Jucker (1993)). As for the DM you knows, there exist many functions that deal with this DM. To list just a few, the DM you know is considered as a marker that indicates some sort of common assumption between interlocutors (see Schourup (1985)); as an indication to acknowledge the understanding of the other party (see Östman (1981)). Last but not least, the DM I mean like you know has a semantic meaning which influence the discourse function (see Schiffrin (1987) Maynard, (2013)). The DM I mean orients toward own talk where the DM you know orients towards the addressee’s knowledge (Schiffrin, 1987).

There has been a growing interest to study discourse markers through many perspectives and approaches. Some scholars have studied DMs to explain the discourse coherence (see Schiffrin (1987), Lenk (1998)), others chose innovative theories like relevancy theory to analyze them (see Jucker (1993), Anderson (2001)), and yet there has been consideration about the structure and the order of utterances by the way of studying DMs (see Fraser (1999)). Such interests have lead to fruitful discussion but they also have developed added complexities. First, there is no agreedupon terminology to address the DMs. Second, the function of the DMs has undergone obscure explanation and finally the context where DMs appear has not been investigated adequately.

First of all, It becomes a complex topic as the abundance of theoretical approaches that have been employed to study DMs have led to the emergence of wide variety of terminologies other than the term ‘Discourse Markers’. To name just a few, Schiffrin (1987: 33) has done analysis by detailing different levels of coherence and integrating them together to “bracket units of talk”. Her bottom-up analysis led to formulates these elements for the first time into the term DMs. Some other scholars like (see Schourup (1985), Kroon (1995) have defined distinct components to analyze these elements. For example, Kroon (1995: 85) believes in order to examine the DMs patently we should consider putting them into frameworks of “basic meaning”, “discourse function” and “actual uses”. However throughout their discussion they refer to DMs as ‘discourse particles’ instead. Yet, others have focused on the pragmatic values of these elements. Their enterprise gave rise to terms like ‘pragmatic particles’ (see Östman (1981)) or ‘pragmatic expression (see Erman (1987)). More recent studies also found the terminology of ‘Discourse Markers’ for their studies.

Their theoretical perspective is considered to be innovative in order to examine the DMs. For example, Miriam Urgelles-Coll (2010) used semantic and syntactic theory and Ursula Lutzky (2012) employed a combination of historical and sociopragmatic theories for the particular DM in their studies. All in all, different terms that are used to refer to DMs stem from different features that in turn have yielded from various theoretical perspectives.

Having said that, the functions that many of DMs supposedly carry out in the discourse have also originated from various theoretical approaches. Their functions cover expressions as vague as e.g. fillers or attitude markers and as specific as e.g. topic changers or repair markers. However, there is no clear and understandable way to observe the connection between the theoretical perspective, the given terminology and the function that the DM is assumed to fulfill (cf. Jucker and Ziv: 1998).

Added complexity is the contexts in which the DMs stand out in the related studies. The primary motivations for the number of studies mentioned above have been certain DMs and their presumed features. It seems that the context is of secondary importance and many contextual elements have been either neglected or left with the minimum researchable importance. Ajimer (2002) identifies this shortcoming in Schiffrin’s phenomenal account on the DMs:

“Schiffrin’s study is restricted to a single text type and a particular group of people (interviews with American Jews in the neighborhood of Philadelphia) and does not account for the distribution of discourse particles over different types of text.” (p. 13)

However recent papers have addressed this imbalance between overemphasizing DMs at the expense of the text type and more specifically the context that they occur in.

Focusing on the syntactical aspects of the DMs seems to have the partial importance in studying DMs. It is believed that many DMs “proto-typically” occupy the sentence initial position (Urgelles-Coll, 2010: 23). They do not belong to any category that constructs any sentences sentence and they can be easily omitted (ibid. 23). Urgelles-Coll (2010: 24) provides an example to look into the matter more clearly:

a) That wasn’t much fun. Well, it is over and done with.

b) That wasn’t much fun. It is over and done with.

(1b) shows that the omission of the DM well does not make the second sentence ungrammatical. Additionally, semantically speaking there is no breach in the truth condition of the sentence either. Like (1a), in most cases, the DM is accompanied with a comma afterwards. However, the syntactical assumptions are not always the straightforward. In (1a), the comma can have an influence on the interpretation of the lexical unit well. Although well is in the beginning of the turn, it is arguable if it can be regarded as an adverb or a DM.

Some are: well in court (Innes B., 2010)well in American and German classrooms (Müller, 2004)like in telling stories (Tree, 2006) etc.

On the other hand, well is a DM by reflecting on the pragmatical assumptions associated with it in the given situation. Thus, having a comma after the well seems not to guarantee the syntactic label of well. In cases like this, we should consider paralinguistic features that accompany the sentences.

One of the contextual elements that can complement the insights from syntactical point of view is prosody. According to Aijmer (2002: 28), the hearer can rely on the contextual elements such as collocation and prosody to distinguish the suitable sense.

She also believes that a separate tone unit along with the position of the lexical item can indicate if a lexical unit is a DM or not (ibid. 59). Therefore the assumption is that the syntactical clues along with prosodic aspects help us identify DMs:

“…as the natural links between intonational structure and pragmatic interpretation may become grammaticalised, a language might develop certain structures whose sole function was to guide the interpretation process by stipulating certain properties of context and contextual effects.” (Sperber and Wilson, 1986)

As a result, the prosodic (intonation) and the syntactical (positional) characteristic of DMs are the features that help us distinguish the DMs more easily.

Bibliography:

1. Longacre, R. E. (1976). "Mystery particles and affixes". In Papers from the 12th Regional Meeting. Chicago linguistic Society. April 23-25, 1976, C. A. Walker, S. S. mufwene, & S. B. Steeve (Eds) 468-475. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

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

3. Kroon, C. (1995). Discourse particles in Latin: a study of nam, enim, autem, vero, and at.Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben.

4. Jucker, A. H., & Ziv, Y. (1998). Discourse Markers : Descriptions and Theory. Amesterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

5. Aijmer, K. (2002). English discourse particles : evidence from a corpus. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.

6. Urgelles-Coll, M. (2010). Syntax and Semantics of Discourse Markers. London:Continuum International Publishing.