Approaching discourse markers in present-day english. A corpus-based study

Abstract

The main aim of this work is the study of discourse or pragmatic markers in present-day written and spoken English by means of a corpus-based methodology which will allow me to analyse data extracted from two main corpora. Thus, this work will be organised into two different parts: a theoretical and a further practical one. On the one hand, in the theoretical part, an overview of their main linguistic features shaped by definition, depiction and formal characteristics will be supplied. Attention will be paid to syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of members of this category of lexical items. On the other hand, the practical part will be devoted to the analysis of a selection of discourse markers, those more characteristic of spokenness and those more characteristic of writtenness, by means of two central corpora: BNC (British National Corpus), and COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). lt is to consider that relevant variation will be found in their frequency of appearance depending on whether they are used in spoken or written language and also according to the variety of English in question, British English versus American English. This dissertation will conclude with a number of reflections on the basis of data analysed which will hopefully make a contribution to this particular fíeld of study