Discourse marker

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In linguistics, a discourse marker is a word or phrase that marks a boundary in a discourse, typically as part of a dialogue. Discourse markers do not belong to the syntactic or semantic structure of an utterance.

Discourse markers are usually polyfunctional elements. Discourse markers can be understood in two ways. Firstly, as elements which serve to the union of utterances (in this sense they are equivalent to the term connective). Secondly, as elements which serve to a variety of conversational purposes .

Traditionally, some of the elements considered discourse markers were treated as "fillers" or "expletives", that is, elements whose function was that of not having any function at all. Nowadays they are assigned functions in different levels of analysis: topic changes, reformulations, discourse planning, stressing, hedging or backchanneling. Those functions can be classified into three broad groups: a) relationships among (parts of) utterances; b) relationships between the speaker and the message, and c) relationships between speaker and hearer.

Diachronic data show that discourse markers often come from different word classes, such as adverbs (well) or prepositional phrases (in fact). The process that leads from a free construction to a discourse marker can be traced back through grammaticalization studies.

Common discourse markers used in the English language include "you know", "actually", "basically", "like", "I mean" and "OK".