Discourse markers are words or phrases that help structure discourse by signaling relationships between ideas and turns in conversation. They do not affect grammaticality or meaning but provide clues about relationships. Common discourse markers in English include "well," "now," "so," and "you know." Discourse markers are features of spoken language and help make conversations smoother and more cohesive by linking ideas and showing attitudes without changing meaning.

1. Discourse Markers
Discourse Analysis
Level-7

2. Discourse Markers :Hedges
 Definition: A discourse marker is a word or a phrase that plays a role in managing
the flow and structure of discourse. Since their main function is at the level of
discourse rather than at the level of utterances or sentences, discourse markers
are relatively syntax-independent and usually do not change the truth conditional
meaning of the sentence.
 Discourse markers could be used to ‘stabilize’ conversation with different
meanings so that there is no vacuum ‘period’ during the conversation, and it
makes the flow of conversation run smoothly.
 The term discourse marker was coined by Deborah Schiffrin in her 1988 book
Discourse Markers.

3. • Discourse markers are words and phrases used in speaking and writing to
'signpost' discourse. Discourse markers do this by showing turns, joining
ideas together, showing attitude, and generally controlling communication.
Some people regard discourse markers as a feature of spoken language
only.
• These Discourse markers are the words and phrases outside of the clause
structure, that function to link segments of the discourse to one another in
ways which reflect choices of monitoring, organization and management
exercised by the speaker.
• Discourse markers are used less frequently in speech, unless the speech is
very formal.

4. Use of Discourse Markers
 The use of discourse markers could make conversation more interesting, more
understandable, and even more polite, and more powerful, though it won’t
change its grammatical meaning.
 It can be read from Fraser’s statement: ‘the absence of the discourse marker
does not render a sentence ungrammatical and /or unintelligible. It does,
however, remove a powerful clue about what commitment the speaker makes
regarding the relationship between the current utterance and the prior
discourse’ (Fraser, 1988:22).
 From that statement, we can see that discourse marker can make
conversation easier, and more interesting to be discussed.

5. Common discourse markers
 Discourse markers often come from different word classes, such
as adverbs ("well") or prepositional phrases ("in fact").
 The most common discourse markers in everyday informal spoken language:
 Single words: anyway, cos, fine, good, great, like, now, oh, okay, right, so, well
 Phrasal and clausal items: you know, I mean, as I say, for a start, mind you.
 Items such as well and right were within the top 50 most frequently occurring words
because of their high frequency as discourse markers in conversation.

6. Basic features of Discourse Markers
Hulker (1991: 78-79) draws attention that there are four basic features that
characterize discourse markers:
(1) they do not affect the truth conditions of an utterance;
(2) they do not add anything to the propositional content of an utterance;
(3) they are related to the speech situation and not to the situation talked about;
and
(4) they have an emotive, expressive function rather than a referential, denotative,
or cognitive function.
(5) For that reason, the use of discourse markers can make discourse to be
explored widely, since the use of them has different functions.

7. Characteristics of discourse markers, according to Brinton (1996) and Jucker
& Ziv (1998) are:
a. Discourse markers are predominantly a feature of oral rather than of written discourse.
b. They appear with high frequency in oral discourse.
c. They are short and phonologically reduced items.
d. They may occur sentence initially, sentence medially and finally as well.
e. They are considered to have little or no prepositional meaning, or at least to be difficult to specify
lexically.
f. As discourse markers may occur outside the syntactic structure or loosely attached to it, they have
no clear grammatical function.
g. They seem to be optional rather than obligatory features of discourse. Their absence "does not
render a sentence ungrammatical and/or unintelligible" but does "remove a powerful clue" (Fraser,
1988, p. 22 as cited by Brinton, 1996, p. 34).
h. They may be multifunctional, operating on the local and global levels simultaneously though it is
difficult to differentiate a pragmatically motivated from a non pragmatically motivated use of the form.

8. Discourse markers in spoken English
Discourse markers are linking words or phrases used in speaking and writing that
direct the flow of the conversation or discourse in various ways.
The following is a comprehensive list of examples.
• To start and to end conversation: So,… Right,…Well,… Now, … Ok,…
• To change topic or return to the topic: By the way/incidentally,… Well, anyway…
• To repeat what I said before: Like I said,… As I say,…
• To continue with the same topic: that reminds me,…
• Ordering or sequencing what we say: In general,… And then,… First (of all)/firstly
• Saying something in another way: Well,… I mean,… In other words,…
• Shared knowledge: You know… You know what I mean…You see,… etc.