Discourse markers are words or short phrases that don’t contribute directly—in a semantic sense—to the meaning of a sentence, but instead contribute pragmatic or attitudinal information.

Without discourse markers, which also include so and indeed, we’d have a tougher time understanding each other. These insubstantial-seeming words are vital to the job of communication.

One of the main problems associated with research on discourse markers concerns their meaning. A large body of rich analyses has been presented, based on a range of different frameworks, such as ...

Abstract: Research on discourse markers has run into fundamental difficulties recently. First, that group of linguistic items appears to withstand approaches trying to account for them in terms of ...

Discourse relations—both explicit, as marked by connectives and cue phrases, and implicit through juxtaposed text segments—are integral to the coherent interpretation and processing of language.