An Adaptation Interpretation of Discourse Markers
Yu Guo · Jiefangjun Waiyu Xueyuan xuebao · 2003
Discourse markers are a linguistic component which does not exert any effect on the truth value of the utterance but expresses attitudinal and procedural meanings. They reflect the adaptation made by language users to contexts;meanwhile, they help languages users construct discourse and perform different pragmatic functions to facilitate communication. In this connection, discourse markers may be divided into three types: the first type indicate that the present utterance and the previous one(s) are semantically or logically related; the second type,mostly hedges, show that the utterance introduced by discourse markers has no necessary logical relation with the previous and following utterances in discourse progressing; the last type simply introduce the following utterance without positing its logical connection with the previous utterance.