What is a Discourse Marker?
A DM is a word or phrase that functions primarily as a structuring unit of spoken language. DMs frequently appear at the beginning or end of an SU. To the listener, a DM signals the speaker’s intention to mark a boundary in discourse, such as a change in the speaker, the beginning of a new topic or the expression of a response: That gets on my nerves, too. Anyway, tell me about your new job. DMs can also serve to indicate the speaker’s attitude or orientation toward the discourse; for instance, a speaker may introduce a discourse marker to indicate a contradictory stance toward what the other speaker has stated: A: I think he’s done a terrible job in that position. If it were up to me I’d fire him. B: See, I don’t know if I’d go that far. Because of the many uses of DMs in speech, and the resulting complexity of defining and identifying them, we will annotate only a limited set of discourse markers that are used in clearly recognizable ways. The following words and phrases will be anno
