English Discourse Particles

There are few aspects of language which are more problematic than its discourse particles. The present study of discourse particles draws upon data from the London-Lund Corpus to show how the methods and tools of corpora can sharpen their description. The first part of the book provides a picture of the state of the art in discourse particle studies and introduces the theory and methodology for the analysis in the second part of the book. Discourse particles are analysed as elements which have been grammaticalised and as a result have certain properties and uses. The importance of linguistic and contextual cues such as text type, position in the discourse, prosody and collocation for analysing discourse particles is illustrated.
The following chapters deal with specific discourse particles (now, oh, just, sort of, and that sort of thing, actually) on the basis of their empirical analysis in the London-Lund Corpus. Examples and extended extracts from many different text types are provided to illustrate what discourse particles are doing in discourse.

Anna-Maria De Cesare on Linguist List 14.87, 2003:
Overall I found "English Discourse Particles" to be very manageable, accessible and pleasant to read. Aijmer's book "English Discourse Particles" gives a very thorough and fine-grained description of the functions of some frequent English DPs. This book is a very rich source of information about the studies that have been undertaken in English (as well as in other languages, such as Italian, French, German and Swedish). This book will therefore be useful to a large group of people, primarily those interested in discourse analysis in general and in DPs in particular. Because this book is very important for the insights it provides about the principles and the mechanisms or routines that are in place when we talk, this volume will certainly also be of much interest to those dealing with more practical applications of linguistic studies: language teachers and lexicographers.