Understanding Pragmatic Markers

The multifunctionality of pragmatic markers makes it difficult to describe their meaning and functional potential. For example we know very little about pragmatic markers and prosody, their sociolinguistic use (how they are related to the speaker's social class, age or gender) or their distribution across text types (informal conversation, discussion, broadcast programme).

This book looks at pragmatic markers in a corpus of spoken English, with a focus on the functions performed by the markers in different types of text. The author explores the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse aspects of the markers. By taking a broader perspective on the markers, classifying them, describing their class-specific properties and analysing individual markers, Karen Aijmer assesses whether any generalisations can be made about the prosody of the markers.