Discourse markers in right periphery : (Inter)subjectivity in text messages
(2011) The Sixth Lancaster University International Postgraduate Conference in Linguistic and English Language — Location: Lancaster University (12.July.2011)
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- Discourse markers (henceforth DMs, also referred to as pragmatic markers or discourse particles) deal with units of conversation which have a connecting function, but which do not affect the truth-conditionality of the sentence. They are often associated with spoken language and have the tendency to appear initially (Schourup 1999). However, some DMs can also occur in written texts and in final position, which is admitted to be a rare position for DMs (Fraser 1999). The right periphery is the place where the stated message is accessible to both the speaker and the hearer: it is a strategic place to comment on the message and to express attitudes (Waltereit & Detges 2004). In the right periphery, DMs tend to have an interpersonal function (Brinton 1996), rather than an information-structuring one. The assumption of this paper is that DMs are essential for interaction. The hypothesis is that we should find DMs in all forms of languages based in communication, including communication with writing constraints. In this paper, I choose to analyse a corpus of text messages. Text messages belong to a wider and recent communication type: computer mediated communication (CMC). Some authors (among them Hård af Segerstad 2005) compared CMC to “transcribed” oral discourse. Texting is a quite spontaneous CMC type in which writing constraints are determined by the communication medium (space, cost, time, encoding) and by the communication situation. Based on a corpus of 25,859 French text messages gathered in Belgium from French native speakers, this paper presents the three most frequent DMs that occur in right periphery, namely quoi, alors and donc. In addition, this paper shows how DMs, following the classification of Jucker and Ziv (1998) and Brinton (1996), present a range of interactional functions: intimacy signals, attitude markers, hedging devices, face savings devices, deference signals, confirmation requests, etc.
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Uygur, D. (2011). Discourse markers in right periphery : (Inter)subjectivity in text messages. The Sixth Lancaster University International Postgraduate Conference in Linguistic and English Language, Lancaster University. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/225526