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Journal ArticleDOI

An Account of Discourse Markers

Bruce Fraser
- 01 Jan 2009 - 
- Vol. 1, Iss: 2, pp 293-320
TLDR
An analysis of the uses of the DM but supports the claim that there is one core meaning relationship, contrast, with the interpretation of the more than 10 different uses of but being signalled by context and pragmatic elaboration.
Abstract
Discourse Markers (DMs) have been a topic of research for 30 years under many different names. The present paper presents an account of one view of DMs with the aim of providing researchers in the field with a coherent definition of DMs and a presentation of the syntactic and semantic properties of this functional category that will enable them to compare their work on DMs with other researchers. In addition, an analysis of the uses of the DM but supports the claim that there is one core meaning relationship, contrast, with the interpretation of the more than 10 different uses of but being signalled by context and pragmatic elaboration.

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The Evolution of Pragmatic Markers in English: Pathways of Change

TL;DR: The authors traces the development of pragmatic markers in English, from hwaet in Old English and whilom in Middle English to whatever and I'm just saying in present-day English.

Annotation upon Annotation: Adding Signalling Information to a Corpus of Discourse Relations

TL;DR: It is shown that a very large number of relations carry signals that identify them as such, and thus the detailed, extensive analysis of signals in the corpus will aid research in the automatic parsing of discourse relations.
Journal ArticleDOI

The combining of Discourse Markers – A beginning

TL;DR: This paper explored what combinations of Contrastive Discourse Markers (CDM) occur in English (eg, but, on the other hand), and Implicative DiscourseMarkers (IDM), and what combinations occur when one member is taken from each class.
Journal ArticleDOI

Signalling of Coherence Relations in Discourse, beyond Discourse Markers.

TL;DR: This article conducted a corpus study on the RST Discourse Treebank, a corpus of newspaper articles annotated for rhetorical (or coherence) relations and found that most relations in text (over 90%) are signalled and also that most signalled relations (over 80%) are indicated not only by discourse markers (and, but, if, since), but also by a wide variety of signals other than discourse markers, such as reference, lexical, semantic, syntactic and graphical features.