Skip to main content

Discourse Markers from a Critical Perspective: Some Theoretical Issues

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Discourse Markers and Beyond

Part of the book series: Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse ((PSDS))

  • 403 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter argues that discourse marker research has been characterized by descriptive approaches: even case studies that take their data from political discourse tend to focus on linguistic patterns of co-occurrence and sequentiality rather than social-institutional norms or broader societal concerns. Therefore, the novelty of the study presented in the chapter is in linking discourse marker research, a primarily discourse analytical, language-oriented field to the broader field of Discourse Studies with a focus on manipulative social practices and their manifestations in discursive strategies.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    These terms will be clarified in Sect. 5 of the chapter.

  2. 2.

    By a neutral pre-genre, Swales means everyday, spontaneous conversations where manipulative intent is not presumed.

References

  • Abuczki, Ágnes, and B. Péter Furkó. 2015. Towards the Construction of a Decision Tree for the Functional Disambiguation of Hungarian DSDs. Poster presented at TextLink: Structuring Discourse in Multilingual Europe, First Action Conference, 25–28 January, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

    Google Scholar 

  • Aijmer, Karin. 1997. I Think—An English Modal particle. In Modality in Germanic Languages: Historical and Comparative Perspective, ed. T. Swan and O.J. Westvik, 1–47. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  • Aijmer, Karin, and Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen. 2009. Pragmatic Markers. In Handbook of Pragmatics: 2009 Installment, ed. Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschuere, 1–29. Amsterdam and Philadephia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Allott, Nicholas. 2005. The Role of Misused Concepts in Manufacturing Consent: A Cognitive Account. In Manipulation and Ideologies in the Twentieth Century, ed. L. de Saussure and P. Schulz, 147–168. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Angermuller, Johannes. 2014. Post-Structuralist Discourse Analysis—Subjectivity in Enunciative Pragmatics. Basingstoke, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Angermuller, Johannes, Dominique Maingueneau, and Ruth Wodak (eds.). 2014. The Discourse Studies Reader—Main Currents in Theory and Analysis. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Armasu, Veronica-Diana. 2013. The Concept of Politeness in Everyday and Professional Discourse. PhD dissertation, Babes-Bolyai University. http://193.231.20.119/doctorat/teza/fisier/1427. Accessed 15 January 2016.

  • Authier-Revuz, Jacqueline. 1984/2014. Hétérogénéité(s) énonciative(s). (Enunciative heterogeneities) Langages 73: 98–111, In The Discourse Studies Reader—Main Currents in Theory and Analysis, ed. Johannes Angermuller, Dominique Maingueneau, and Ruth Wodak, 155–165. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1987. The Dialogic Imagination: 4 Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Becker, Annette. 2007. Are You Saying…? A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Interviewing Practices in TV Election Night Coverages. In Political Discourse in the Media, ed. Anita Fetzer and Gerda Lauerbach, 139–162. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beeching, Kate. 2016. Pragmatic Markers in British English—Meaning in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Billig, Michael. 2008. The Language of Critical Discourse Analysis: The Case of Nominalization. Discourse & Society 19 (6): 783–800.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blakemore, Diane, and Fabrizio Gallai. 2014. Discourse Markers in Free Indirect Style and Interpreting. Journal of Pragmatics 60: 106–120.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse—A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bramley, Nicolette Ruth. 2001. Pronouns of Politics: The Use of Pronouns in the Construction of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ in Political Interviews. PhD dissertation, Australian National University. https://digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/46225/5/01front.pdf. Accessed 10 August 2016.

  • Clayman, Steven, and John Heritage. 2004. The News Interview—Journalists and Public Figures on the Air. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Connel, Ian. 1980. Television News and Social Contrast. In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, ed. Stuart Hall, Doothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, 139–156. London: Hutchinson.

    Google Scholar 

  • de Saussure, Louis. 2007. Pragmatic Issues in Discourse Analysis. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines 1 (1): 179–195.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dedaic, Mirjana N. 2005. Ironic Denial: Toboze in Croatian Political Discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 37 (5): 667–683.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dér, Csilla Ilona. 2017. Diskurzusjelölők a spontán beszélt nyelvben. habilitációs dolgozat, Budapest: ELTE-BTK.

    Google Scholar 

  • Downing, Angela. 2009. Surely as a Marker of Dominance and Entitlement in the Crime Fiction of P. D. James. Brno Studies in English 35 (2): 79–92.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ducrot, Oswald. 1984. Le dire et le dit. Paris: Minuit.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fetzer, Anita. 2000a. Contextualization Cues: More- and Less-Fuzzy Hedges, Discourse Markers and Interpersonal Markers. Discourse Particles, Modal and Focal Particles and all that stuff … An International Conference on Particles, Linguistic Society of Belgium, Brussels.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fetzer, Anita. 2000b. Negotiating Validity Claims in Political Interviews. Text 20 (4): 1–46.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fetzer, Anita. 2007. Challenges in Political Interviews: An Intercultural Analysis. In Political Discourse in the Media, ed. Anita Fetzer and Gerda Lauerbach, 163–192. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Fetzer, Anita. 2014. I Think, I Mean and I Believe in Political Discourse: Collocates. Functions and Distribution. Functions of Language 21 (1): 67–94.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fetzer, Anita, and Elda Weizman. 2006. Political Discourse as Mediated and Public Discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 38: 143–153.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fischer, Kerstin (ed.). 2006. Approaches to Discourse Particles. Oxford: Elsevier.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fowler, Roger, Bob Hodge, Gunther Kress, and Tony Trew. 1979. Language and Social Control. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fraser, Bruce. 1996. Pragmatic Markers. Pragmatics 6: 167–190.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Furkó, Bálint Péter. 2007. The Status of Of Course as a Discourse Marker. HUSSE 8 Conference Proceedings. http://husse-esse.hu/wp-content/2007/04/furko-peter-of-course-as-a-dm.doc. Accessed 20 December 2018.

  • Furkó, Bálint Péter. 2013. The Functional Spectrum of Pragmatic Markers in Political News Interviews and Celebrity Interviews. Topics in Linguistics 11: 13–21.

    Google Scholar 

  • Furkó, Bálint Péter. 2017. Manipulative Uses of Pragmatic Markers in Political Discourse. Palgrave Communications 3: 17054. https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2017.54.

  • Furkó, Bálint Péter, and Ágnes Abuczki. 2014. English Discourse Markers in Mediatised Political Interviews. Brno Studies in English 40 (1): 45–64.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Furkó, Bálint Péter, András Kertész, and Ágnes Abuczki. 2019. Discourse Markers in Different Types of Reporting. In Indirect Reports—Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy and Psychology, ed. Alessandro Capone, 243–276. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Greatbatch, David. 1986. Aspects of Topical Organisation in News Interviews: The Use of Agenda-Shifting Procedures by Interviewees. Media, Culture and Society 8 (4): 441–455.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gumperz, John. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Heritage, John, and David Greatbatch. 1991. On the Institutional Character of Institutional Talk: the Case of News Interviews. In Talk and Social Structure: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, ed. B. Deirdre and D.H. Zimmermann, 93–137. Berkley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hill, Jane H. 1999. Read My Article: Ideological Complexity and the Overdetermination of Promising in American Presidential Politics. In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, ed. P.V. Kroskrity, 259–291. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ho, Victor. 2013. Strategic Use of Nouns and Pronouns in Public Discourse: The Case of the Fine-Tuning of the Medium of Instruction Policy in Hong Kong. Pragmatics 23 (1): 51–67.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Holmes, Janet. 1988. Of Course: A Pragmatic Particle in New Zealand Women’s and Men’s Speech. Australian Journal of Linguistics 2: 49–74.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Holmes, Janet. 1990. Hedges and Boosters in Women’s and Men’s Speech. Language & Communication 10: 185–205.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Huspek, Michael. 1989. Linguistic Variability and Power: An Analysis of You Know/I Think Variation in Working-Class Speech. Journal of Pragmatics 13: 661–683.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ifantidou, Elly. 2001. Evidentials and Relevance. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Irimiea, Silvia. 2010. Rhetorical and Comparative Study of the Victory Speeches of Barack Obama and Mircea Geoana. JoLIE 3: 41–53.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kantara, Argyro. 2012. Adversarial Challenges and Responses in Greek Political Interviews: A Case Study. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines 5 (2): 171–189.

    Google Scholar 

  • Khosravinik, Majid. 2010. The Representation of Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Immigrants in British Newspapers. Journal of Language and Politics 9 (1): 1–28.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lauerbach, Gerda. 2006. Discourse Representation in Political Interviews: The Construction of Identities and Relations Through Voicing and Ventriloquizing. Journal of Pragmatics 38: 196–215.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lerner, Gene H. 1994. Responsive List Construction. Language and Social Psychology 13: 20–33.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, Diana. 2006. Discourse Markers in English: A Discourse-Pragmatic View. In Approaches to Discourse Particles, ed. Kerstin Fischer, 43–59. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

    Google Scholar 

  • McNair, Brian. 2011. An Introduction to Political Communication. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Mölder, Martin. 2010. Meanings of Democracy in Estonia: An Analysis of Focus Group Discussions. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines 4 (1): 38–53.

    Google Scholar 

  • Németh, T. Enikő. 2014. Implicit Arguments at the Grammar-Pragmatics Interface: Some Methodological Considerations. Argumentum 10: 679–694.

    Google Scholar 

  • Norrby, Catrin, and Joanne Winter. 2002. Affiliation in Adolescents’ Use of Discourse Extenders. In Proceedings of the 2001 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/als2001/winter_norrby.pdf. Accessed 20 December 2018.

  • Nuckolls, Janice. 1993. The Semantics of Certainty in Quechua and Its Implications for a Cultural Epistemology. Language in Society 22: 235–255.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Šandová, Jana Kozubíková. 2010. Speaker’s Involvement in Political Interviews. MA thesis, Masarykova University, Brno, Czech Republic. https://is.muni.cz/th/tzbxy/Disertacni_prace.pdf. Accessed 10 January 2019.

  • Schegloff, Emmanuel. 1972. Notes on a Conversational Practice: Formulating Place. In Studies in Social Interaction, ed. David Sudnow, 75–119. New York: Free Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Schourup, Lawrence. 1999. Discourse Markers: Tutorial Overview. Lingua 107: 227–265.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie. 1988. What Really Really Means in Casual Conversation and in Political Interviews. Linguistica Antverpiensia 22: 206–225.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie. 1992. The Interactional Utility of Of Course in Spoken Discourse. Occasional Papers in Systemic Linguistics 6: 213–226.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie, P.R.R. White, and Karin Aijmer. 2007. Presupposition and ‘Taking-for-Granted’ in Mass Communicated Political Argument: An Illustration from British, Flemish and Swedish Political Colloquy. In Political Discourse in the Media, ed. Anita Fetzer and Gerda Lauerbach, 31–75. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 2002. Pragmatics, Modularity and Mindreading. Mind and Language 17: 3–23.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stenström, Anna-Brita. 1990. Lexical Items Peculiar to Spoken Discourse. In The London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English: Description and Research, ed. Jan Svartvik, 137–175. Lund: Lund University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stubbe, Maria, and Janet Holmes. 1995. You Know, Eh and Other Exasperating Expressions: An Analysis of Social and Stylistic Variation in the Use of Pragmatic Devices in a Sample of New Zealand English. Language & Communication 15: 63–88.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stubbs, Michael. 1996. Text and Corpus Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Swales, John. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tranchese, Alessia, and Sole Alba Zollo. 2013. The Construction of Gender-Based Violence in the British Printed and Broadcast Media. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines 7 (1): 141–163.

    Google Scholar 

  • van Dijk, Teun A. 1993. Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis. Discourse and Society 4 (2): 249–283.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • van Dijk, Teun A. 2008. Discourse and Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • van Leeuwen, Theo. 1996. The Representation of Social Actors. In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. Carmen Rosa, Caldas-Coulthard, and Malcolm Coulthard, 32–70. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, John. 1993. Discourse Marking and Accounts of Violence in Northern Ireland. Text 13 (3): 455–475.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, John. 2001. Political Discourse. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton, 398–414. Boston, MA: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wodak, Ruth. 1989. Language, Power and Ideology. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Wodak, Ruth. 2007. Pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis: A Cross-Theoretical Inquiry. Pragmatics & Cognition 15 (1): 203–234.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wodak, Ruth. 2009. The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer. 2009. Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Agenda, Theory, and Methodology. In Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 1–33. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zovko, Ivana. 2012. Contrastive Analysis of Discourse Markers in the Interviews with Presidents of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the U.S.A. Paper presented at 2nd International Conference on Foreign Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (FLTAL’12), Sarajevo.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Péter B. Furkó .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Furkó, P.B. (2020). Discourse Markers from a Critical Perspective: Some Theoretical Issues. In: Discourse Markers and Beyond. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37763-2_3

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics