A Study On Discourse Markers

Discourse markers, some of which are traditionally categorized under the class of functional words, have drawn great attention with the emergence of pragmatics and discourse analysis. The category shows up distinctively in many discourse-related studies and has been labeled with a fuzzy boundary of terms, such as pragmatic markers, cue phrases, and discourse connectives and so on, which to some extent shows their complexity.Studies on discourse markers have been conducted under various frameworks. Both their synchronic status and diachronic development have been researched. Both theoretical and empirical studies on the subject have been conducted. All most every aspect of the category has been taped in the literature, such as their prosodic features, syntactic and semantic properties and so on. For synchronic theoretic studies, discourse markers are mainly studied within two different orientations: one is from the perspective of discourse coherence, the other is the relevance-theoretical account of the category. Besides, the diachronic development of discourse markers is also studied within the framework of grammaticalization, which has shed some light on how discourse markers achieve their present functions. However, it seems that the more researches are conducted on the subject, the more complex this category becomes. No agreement has yet been achieved on many key issues of discourse markers, such as what are discourse markers, what their functions are, or how they serve their functions.The present paper mainly focuses on discourse markers in English. They are mainly studied from a theoretical perspective and two significant points for studying discourse markers are concentrated on, that is, the definition and functions of discourse markers. A comparative study of some previous researches on the two issues will be conducted in this paper and something significant emerges. The problems are then analyzed in detail in an attempt to arrive at some new ideas on the complex category of discourse markers.