FUNCTIONING DISCOURSE MARKERS TO CONSTRUCT A SOCIAL SITUATION IN SPEECH

This study relates the discussion of discourse markers to their functions from a social context. It aims to identify discourse markers and analyze their function to construct a social situation in Steve Jobs’ speech delivered at Stanford Commencement Address. To analyze the data in this study, the researchers used a qualitative descriptive method. This study showed that the dominant discourse markers used were connective, followed by cause result, temporal adverb, and marker of response, respectively, in which the last marker was the least used. Furthermore, all discourse markers functioned to gain coherent message delivery in the speech by considering the “setting and scene," "participants," "ends,” “act sequence,” “key,” “instrumentalities,” “norms of interaction,” and “genre,” all of which were shortened in the acronym of “speaking.” Finally, based on its social situation, the present study is expected to broaden the understanding of discourse markers in a particular text.

STUDENTS ATTITUDE IN LEARNING ENGLISH CONVERSATIONS

English conversation is an important lesson for Senior High School students in order to face the globalization effects. Many students considered English conversation as a controversial lesson through their positive and negative attitudes toward it. This study aimed to investigate the types of attitudes of the Senior High School students in learning English conversation, to describe the realization of the attitudes of Senior High School students in learning English conversations, and to explain the reason of the attitude which Senior High School students realized in the ways they are. The subjects of this study were 20 students consisting 12 females and 8 males at the age of 16-18 years old. The data were collected by observations and interviews then were analyzed using Interactive Models. The result showed that positive and negative attitude in learning English conversations, five types of realizations, and the reasons of the students realized their attitudes i.e. the language loyalty, language pride, and awareness of language norms. It was concluded that the students’ attitude varied as to positive and negative ones and realized in numerous manners affected by several factors. Keywords: Discourse Markers, Students Interactions, Nonformal Education, Conversation

DISCOURSE MARKERS USED BY STUDENTS IN NONFORMAL EDUCATION

It is very common to acknowledge that in order to achieve a good communication, discourse markers are needed as one of a tool to perform in linking the ideas to ideas, especially in spoken language, it’s really helpful in guiding the speakers and listeners to comprehend what is being discussed or talked. There are several studies has been discussed about what discourse markers are especially in spoken language, but in this research, the realization of discourse markers is the aim of the study. The data source of this research were students in Harford Institute Sekip Branch, there were 16 students taken from 4 different levels and they were taken by using purposive sampling. The data were the words from their utterances which contains of discourse markers which were collected by using audio recorder. And the research was done by applying descriptive qualitative method. The result revealed that there are 3 realizations based on the position found in Discourse Markers, they are at the boundary (Initial), after the first word (Middle) and later (Final), where initial discourse markers appeared as the most dominant one. It is proved that the discourse marker realized in the Initial position to signal upcoming information, since discourse markers has the essential function to connect or link ideas to the ideas or even as a pause in the speech. Keywords: Discourse Markers, Students Interactions, NonformalEducation

The discourse marker ale in Bislama oral narratives

This study takes us to the South Pacific and concentrates on Bislama, one of the dialects of Melanesian pidgin (Siegel 2008: 4) and one of the official languages of Vanuatu. We take a discourse analysis perspective to map out the functions of ale, a conspicuous discourse marker in conversations and narratives. Using Labov & Waletzky (1967) model, we analyze the use of ale in narratives from the book Big Wok: Storian blong Wol Wo Tu long Vanuatu (Lindstrom & Gwero 1998) and determine that ale is a discourse marker which indicates temporal sequence and consequence, frames speech reports and closes a digression. We conclude our study by considering a possible historical development of ale. We map out how French allez could have become Bislama ale using imposition and functional transfer (Siegel 2008; Winford 2013a) of vernacular discourse markers (such as go in Nguna).

On the Diachrony of the Clitic Cluster in Bulgarian

The article traces back the formation of the clitic cluster in Bulgarian starting from the Old Church Slavonic through Middle Bulgarian up to the Early Modern Bulgarian and beyond. It offers a hypothetical two-layer structure of the cluster – with the main layer consisting of a (pronominal) core and a (verbal) periphery, and a secondary layer hosting (‘quasi-clitical’) elements that exhibit, both diachronically and synchronically, a behaviour that is not strictly consistent with that of the clitical elements. The language material from three corpora shows that there was no change in the positions of the elements in the core, and the changes in the periphery observed are mainly due to the changes in the set of the elements (as a result of the restructuring of the pronoun system and changes in the auxiliary system, as well as the loss of some early clitics, such as the discourse markers).

Mehrsprachigkeit in transmodaler Kommunikation

The paper is concerned with codeswitching in transmodal WhatsApp messenger chats. Based on a corpus of text and audio postings from a group of German-Lebanese cousins that is complemented by ethnographic interviews, the study shows that language alternations can be associated with particular metapragmatic or indexical functions in the different modalities. In audio postings, switching between German and Arabic contextualises varying discourse relations. Also, the cousins use Arabic discourse markers (such as ya'ne, ‘it means’) frequently to structure their talk. In contrast, when they switch to Arabic in their text-postings – using Arabizi, a CMC-register in the Arabic-speaking world – this recurrently establishes a playful or ironic frame for ritual teasings. The final section discusses these transmodal and multilingual practices as multi-layered identity positionings vis-à-vis a monolingual society, their multilingual family and networked communities.

Ei saa me läbi “Pragmaatika” korpuseta. Korpuspragmaatika ja pragmaatikakorpus

Within the project “Pragmatics above grammar: Subjectivity and intersubjectivity in Estonian registers and text types” (PRG341) we are studying the expression of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in different written and spoken registers of modern Estonian. We focus on adverbs that function as discourse markers (e.g. vist ‘maybe, probably’, ilmselt ‘apparently, obviously’, tegelikult ‘actually’), markers that develop from main clauses containing cognition verbs that take sentence complements (e.g. (ma) arvan ‘I think’, usun ‘I believe’, (mulle) tundub ‘it seems (to me), it appears (that)’) as well as modal and performative verbs (e.g. võib (juhtuda) ‘can (happen’, peaks (tulema) ‘should (come)’; kinnitan/väidan (olevat) ‘I affirm/claim’). The analysis combines quantitative corpus-linguistic and qualitative pragmatic approaches, thus belonging to the field of corpus pragmatics. Unlike previous studies of related topics, the project systematically compares the usage of markers in different registers (spoken, online communication, print texts) and text types. The pilot studies performed thus far have revealed several problems with the existing Estonian corpora, important in the study of pragmatics. Firstly, some text types are underrepresented or not represented at all, the text types cannot always be distinguished, and the particular text may not always correspond to the nominal text type (e.g. an academic text may contain quotes from texts of other types). All of this makes it difficult to do comparative statistical analysis of different text types. Secondly, the markers under examination are multifunctional and identifying their (inter)subjective function requires consideration of context broader than a single sentence. However, the public search systems for the existing corpora do not provide this context. For instance, the discourse marker function of cognition verbs is indicated primarily by the fact that the topic of the conversation or text follows through the subordinate clause, not the main clause. Since the available search systems do not provide context larger than a single sentence, the identification of the topic of the discourse, and therefore of the potential discourse-marker function of the verb, is made more difficult. To avoid these problems, the project working group is developing a new “Pragmatics” corpus, being created in the SketchEngine environment. The corpus is made up of 10 subcorpora representing different text types and registers. Each subcorpus contains roughly 500,000 words.

Ni as the introductory particle for expressions of negation in three dialectal variants of Spanish

When looking at expressions of negation/rejection in Spanish, the conjunction ni is one of the most prolific words. However, the extent of locutions employing ni has not been widely analyzed. For this reason, we conducted a comparative descriptive examination of discourse markers of rejection and refusal for three different dialectal variants of Spanish: those of Spain, Colombia and Mexico. The participants completed a survey to evaluate their familiarity with some of these pragmatic expressions and to provide new ones. Results show that speakers of these dialectal variants all use the most common markers that start with ni, but also other phrases not recorded in many of the available sources. This paper aims to broaden the horizon of work on phraseological units of negation, which are often difficult to gather and study in depth because of their dialectal variability, colloquial use, and, in some cases, short lifespan.

Discourse markers in relation tonon-verbal behavior

The research proposed in this paper focuses on pragmatic interlinks between discourse markers and non-verbal behavior. Although non-verbal behavior is recognized to add non-redundant information and social interaction is not merely recognized as the transmission of words and sentences, the evidence regarding grammatical/linguistic interlinks between verbal and non-verbal concepts are vague and limited to restricted domains. This is even more evident when non-verbal behavior acts in the foreground but contributes to the structure and organization of the discourse. This research focuses on investigating the multimodal nature of discourse markers by observing their linguistic and paralinguistic properties in informal discourse. We perform a quantitative analysis with case studies for representative cases. The results show that discourse markers and background non-verbal behavior tend to follow a similar functionality in interaction. Therefore, by examining them together, one gains more insight into their true intent despite the high multifunctionality of both non-verbal behavior and DMs.