| Primarily based on unstructured interview conversations, the study attempts to unveil the pragmatic functions of some seemingly redundant verbal "fillers" that pervade spontaneous colloquial Cairene discourse. Expressions such as /ya9ni/ (I mean, well), /tayyib/ (well, so), and /inta-9aaref/ (y'know) are found to be signals of pragmatic meaning other than, or in addition to, any propositional meaning they may have.; The item /ya9ni/, essentially a marker of speaker orientation to aspects of meaning of talk, signals a speaker's awareness of the requirements of interaction especially at junctures where the options for superficial coherence are not adhered to. In this sense, its use underlies the relevance, manner, and/or quality of a current contribution vis-a-vis prior discourse.; The marker /tayyib/ signals a speaker's orientation to the dynamics of the interactional process itself. It marks a speaker's communicative intention of giving due attention to prior proceedings, even if the nature of subsequent moves are not consonant with previous contributions. Hence its use to preface contrastive viewpoints, initiate new topics, claim turns, resume conversations after some interruption, and close them down. In addition, it helps to attenuate the face threats that might result from these delicate interactional moves.; The expression /inta-9aaref/, used essentially to signal a speaker's willingness that some message be taken as mutual shared knowledge, underlies addressee-oriented and/or message-oriented certainty/uncertainty. It also occasions changes in the interactional frame as participants' information undergo gradual transitions throughout the discourse.; The study concludes that, like English discourse markers, these expressions signal "a distinct pragmatic meaning which captures some aspect of a speaker's communicative intention" (Fraser, 1991). This is manifested in the way they display various discoursal relationships between different (usually) adjacent turns. They also indicate the way participants in a given interaction choose to conform to the conversational maxims (Grice, 1975). Finally, they reflect the fine synchronization in speaker/hearer alignment to the requirements of the interaction. |
