Discourse marker

We had "opinion-sharing debates" via Skype last week and while our conversation I paid my attention to the way you're speaking and the sentence constructions.

So, when I hear such kind of words like "oh..., well..., now....,then...., you know...., I mean..." etc., it feels close to native speakers' speech. That's why I decided to dedicate this week Grammar topic to the discourse markers.

Let's start with the definition.

Discourse markers are words and phrases used in speaking and writing to 'signpost' discourse. Discourse markers do this by showing turns, joining ideas together, showing attitude, and generally controlling communication.

Traditionally, some of the words or phrases that were considered discourse markers were treated as "fillers" - words or phrases that had no function at all. Now they are assigned functions in different levels of analysis: topic changes, reformulations, discourse planning, stressing etc.

There are some categories of discourse markers:

• Perception: "look", "believe me"
• Agreement: "exactly", or disagreement: "I'm not sure"
• Amazement: "wow"
• Sequence: "now", "then"
• Causality: "because"
• Organization: "first of all"
• Introduction: "so"
• Summarization: "in the end"