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What Are Discourse Markers?

Discourse markers, for a very long time, had been regarded as the detritus of a discourse, useless, meaningless and unworthy of academic attention. In tandem with discourse analysis and pragmatics in the last five decades, discourse markers have been attracting more and more attentions from scholars. Although recent research on discourse markers is astonishingly progressing, consensus on discourse markers’ definition and function has not yet been reached. Generally speaking, two representative groups of scholars, namely coherence theorists represented by Schiffrin, Redeker, and Fraser, etc., and relevance theorists represented by Blakemore, Sperber, and Wilson,etc., delimit discourse markers in different categories and explore discourse markers’ functions in different scopes. The former studies discourse markers mainly within discourse itself, claiming that discourse markers’ crucial function is to contribute to discourse coherence locally or globally; on the contrary, the latter investigates discourse markers beyond the discourse, proposing discourse markers should only be those items with procedural meaning rather than conceptual meaning, and forgoing the notion of coherence, which is deemed to be secondary and derivative to relevance. After generalizing discourse markers’ three necessary attributes (non-truth-conditionality, optionality, and connectivity) and two different views mentioned, we advocate exploring discourse markers in a micro and macro-level of discourse in a wider sense of context so that we can define discourse makers more comprehensively.