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English discourse markers in non-native use

The case of Czech learners at B2 level

Silvie Válková

Palacký University Olomouc

English discourse markers in non-native use

The case of Czech learners at B2 level

Silvie Válková

Olomouc 2026

This publication was made possible thanks to targeted funding provided by the Faculty of Arts, Palacký University Olomouc, from the Fund for the support of scientific activities (No. FPVC2026/11).

Reviewed by: doc. PhDr. Renata Povolná, Ph.D.

PhDr. Šárka Ježková, Ph.D.

Unauthorised use of this work is an infringement of copyright and may give rise to civil, administrative or criminal liability.

1st edition

DOI: 10.5507/ff.26.24467856

ISBN 978-80-244-6785-6 (print)

ISBN 978-80-244-6786-3 (online: iPDF)

ISBN 978-80-244-6787-0 (online: ePub)

Acknowledgements

This book, the culmination of several years of research and revision, would not have been possible without the intellectual inspiration, critical feedback, and personal encouragement of some people and institutions.

My foremost gratitude goes to professor Jarmila Tárnyiková. I wish to thank her for all the hours she spent reading and discussing early versions of this work, for her rigorous critiques, endless patience, and support.

I greatfully acknowledge my colleagues from Pardubice University, who built the Corpus of Czech Students’ Spoken English, without which my research would not have been possible. Last but not least I would like to thank all the linguists and grammarians from the reference list, from whom I got theoretical background and inspiration for my own research.

My sincere thanks go to Palacký University Press and the two reviewers, PhDr. Šárka Ježková, Ph.D. and doc. PhDr. Renata Povolná, Ph.D., whose meticulous comments and challenging questions elevated the final manuscript.

I take sole responsibility for the accuracy of interpreting the data and the conclusions reached.

List of tables

Table

Table 31 Co-occurrence of you know with adverbs derived by -ly

Table 32 Co-occurrence of you know with function words

Table 33 Co-occurrence of you know with finite clauses (statement)

Table 34 Spectrum of the functions of like in recent research

Table

List of figures

List of overviews

1 Introduction

This study grew out of my long-term interest in what I refer to here as communicatively-regulative units of language in general and discourse markers (henceforth DMs) in particular. My epistemic path of research can be described as a three-step-procedure ranging from mapping the field via corpus-based research with quantitative and qualitative data processing, to applying the results of the previous phases and their incorporation into ELT methodology with the aim to improve the pragmatic and communicative competences of a target group of non-native speakers of English, as represented by Czech learners at B2 level, in the domain of DMs perception and usage.

The initial inspiration for my research into DMs was the information in an evaluation report from the late nineties related to Czech students who studied abroad after the Velvet Revolution. The report stated that Czech students had sufficient factual knowledge (sometimes even more than local students had), but they lacked the ability to communicate their knowledge correctly and appropriately. They did not know how to address teachers or how to interrupt someone politely, they sounded rather too direct, which also involved the sporadic use of DMs. This is why I decided to investigate whether the situation has changed since then and how Czech speakers of English involve DMs in their communication nowadays.

During the mapping phase (cf. my diploma thesis from 1990), the underlying theoretical framework was mostly based on available studies of that time (Schiffrin, 1987; Stubbs, 1983; Svartvik, 1980), and the choice of DMs (well, oh, ah, now, why, o.k.) reflected the frequency of their occurrence, with the spectrum of meanings of the selected DMs extracted from English monolingual dictionaries. In order to verify the dictionary-based functions, the manual corpus was compiled, based on contemporary English prose.

The results served as the basis for comparing forms, functions and distribution of English DMs with their Czech translation counterparts. The comparison revealed that while the English DMs were more frequent and highly ritualised in use, their Czech counterparts were less frequent. Very often the source language DM was compensated for by a zero equivalent in Czech.

My doctoral thesis on politeness and its language manifestation (2000), though seemingly remote to the present topic, enabled me to disclose high frequency of DMs serving various functions associated with overt language manifestation of speech act sets (operating e.g. as pacifiers, softeners, or downtowners in apologies, compliments, requests, commands, etc.). Moreover, on top of their occurrence as isolated items, some of the DMs emergent from partly manual and partly official language corpora (a transcribed version of spoken English in so called London-Lund corpus) occurred in chains of various regulative signposts, as in Well, now, to tell you the truth, he is a sort of a lazy boy. But, as mentioned above, in searching the language manifestations of politeness, the DMs were perceived rather as a subconscious by-product in that phase of my research, to be reactivated and foregrounded in my habilitation thesis, entitled Regulating discourse: compliments and discourse signposts. English-Czech interface.

The goal of the thesis was twofold: to investigate the role of compliments in the English-Czech interface and create a network of communicatively-regulative units in which DMs are looked upon as one of the possible groups of discourse signposts (cf. hedges, mitigators, text orienters, etc.). The results based on BNC (British National Corpus) and ČNK (Czech National Corpus) revealed different saturation of forms, functions and distribution of the selected markers oh, well and now when looked upon from the English-Czech interface. The comparison was perceived as a reflection of preferences in different socio-cultural settings, tradition, values, communicative routines, and language users’ expectations.

The theoretical framework of the present study follows the tradition of a functional and systemic approach to language, as advocated by the Prague School scholars, their followers and other linguists whose approach is close to the Prague School tradition, such as M. A. K. Halliday. In his studies and monographs, though difficult to follow at places and requiring re-reading in order to grasp the ‘scales of delicacy’ of his conception, there are many ideas valuable in authentic data processing and the methodology of socialising non-native users of a target language into the socio-pragmatic behaviour prototypical of the respective target language communities. Compare such titles as Learning how to mean (1975), An Introduction to Functional Grammar (1985), or his monograph on social facets of language use, entitled Language as Social Semiotic. The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning (1978, 1984). The theoretical part of my study benefits from many of his taxonomies, explanations and proposals.

In An Introduction to Functional Grammar, Halliday (1985, pp. 68-69) identifies two most fundamental types of speech roles, which, in his view, “lie behind all the more specific types that we may eventually be able to recognize”. These are giving and demanding. In interaction we are giving something to the addressee (e.g. a piece of information) and demand something from them (e.g. an answer). Both these exchanges are, according to the exchanged commodities, subcategorised into goods & services (Pass me the salt.), or information (When did you last see your father?). When projecting his conception into my role in this study, prevailing in the theoretical part will be ‘giving information’ and in the application part, ‘giving goods and offering services’, with the hope that ‘demanding’ will be teachers, learners, and education authorities responsible for selling goods and offering appropriate services.

The study is divided into two parts – theoretical, providing a guidance to various approaches to DMs, concerning their status, formal, functional and discourse properties but also considering

the cross-language similarities and differences in their use; and practical, discussing my hands-on experience with processing authentic corpora of Czech learners and deducing their pragmatic competences. The results of my analysis will be confronted with the requirements of education authorities and the reflection of these requirements in teaching programmes, teaching materials and other educational activities.

2 Theoretical part

2.1 DISCOURSE MARKERS

2.1.1 Terminology

The variety of labels used for units which are structurally dispensable but communicatively relevant (e.g. oh, well, now, ok, actually, I think, etc.) reflects the heterogeneity of theories from which the multifaceted nature of DMs is approached. Although we have witnessed numerous discussions and attempts to unify the terminology, recent publications still show that even if many terms have received objections, researchers have not come to a satisfying consensus yet (e.g. Culpeper et al., 2017; Fedriani & Sansó, 2017). What can be even more confusing is the finding that it is not only the terms that researchers do not agree on – in some cases different items are grouped under the same umbrella term, or, on the other hand, the same umbrella terms can encapsulate different language means. As Neary-Sundquist (2013, p. 2) remarks, “it appears that like snowflakes, no two lists of pragmatic markers are alike”.

We are faced with two types of terminological variation: variation in key terms (i.e. whether connective, marker or signal is preferred) or variation within various premodifying attributes (e.g. discourse, pragmatic, utterance, etc.). The result is chaotic rather than terminologically stable and transparent (see Table 1).

The attributes that appear in studies usually try to capture a different pragmatic, semantic or syntactic property of items referred to as discourse markers in Schiffrin (1987). The most frequent attributes used in two-word terms in contemporary research are discourse and pragmatic (Válková, 2012). According to Romero-Trillo (2019),

some researchers distinguish clearly between the two attributes, while for some the attribute pragmatic is more general, superordinate, subsuming the terms with the attribute discourse. Fraser (1999), for example, considers DMs a subset of pragmatic markers.

Apart from discourse and pragmatic, other attributes can be faced with. Their usage is rather sporadic (phatic, sentence, semantic) and unlike the attributes discourse and pragmatic, they collocate with one specific expression only (see below).

The following table of various labels is based on Beeching and Detges (2014), Fraser (1999), Heine et al. (2021), Povolná (2008), and Yang (2011) publications. The list is far from complete but it attempts to illustrate the variety of labels (for more overviews see for example Brinton, 1996; Jucker & Ziv, 1998; Müller, 2005). Recent trends also suggest that some researchers use their terms without a need to explain in detail or defend their options (Aijmer, 2013; Ament & Parés, 2017), which makes the situation even more confusing.

DISCOURSE

connectives

items (D-items)

markers

Blakemore (1987)

PRAGMATIC

connectives

expressions

formatives

Stenström (1984, 1990a)

Svartvik & Ekedahl (1995)

Povolná (2006)

Schiffrin (1987)

Fraser (1990, 1999)

Stenström (1994)

Swan (1995)

Aijmer (1996)

Biber (1999)

operators

markers

van Dijk (1979)

Stubbs (1983)

Erman (1986, 1987)

Fraser (1987)

Fraser (1988, 1990)

Brinton (1996)

Andersen (2001)

Erman (2001)

Aijmer (2013)

Redeker (1990) operators Ariel (1994)

organisers Pons Bordería (1998)

particles

signalling devices

signals

signposts

Schourup (1985)

Aijmer (2002)

Polanyi & Scha (1983)

Stenström (1989, 1990b)

Aijmer (2002)

Válková (2012)

Table 1 Overview of terminology

particles

Östman (1981, 1982, 1995)

Beeching (2002)

The use of other attributes/terms is rather sporadic, with the emphasis on the syntactic or semantic levels of analysis – sentence connectives (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) and semantic conjuncts (Quirk et al., 1985); the emphasis on one of the functions of language in interaction – phatic connectives (Bazanella, 1990); or reflecting specific theoretical frameworks – cue phrases (Quirk, 1972) or cue words (Horne et al., 2001). The attributes linguistic, modal, utterance or conversational also appear occasionally – linguistic markers (Redeker, 1991), modal particles (Waltereit, 2001), utterance particles (Luke, 1990) or conversational greasers (Fillmore as cited in Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1992). Quirk et al. (1985) also used the

term style disjuncts or conjuncts; speech act adverbials were used by Aijmer (1997), formulaic theticals by Heine et al. (2016). More complex terms also appeared in some research – illocutionary force indicating devices (Verschueren et al., 1995) or pragmatic force modifiers (Lin, 2010; Nikula, 1996). The last group of terms is based on one-word labels – fumbles (Edmondson, 1981), punctors (Vincent & Sankoff, 1992), hedges and boosters (Hyland, 1998a, b), backchannels (Verschueren, 1999), continuatives (Romero-Trillo, 1997), fillers (Brown & Yule, 1983) and gambits (Keller, 1979) which do not seem to have been used in recent research.

In this study, I follow a widely used convention of the term DMs although my understanding of these items differs from the original proposal by Schiffrin (1987) – see below. My preference of this term is influenced by the fact that most researchers (and probably even teachers or people not interested in linguistics) would have at least an approximate understanding of the meaning. The frequency of use also supports my choice – simple internet search shows that the term DMs is used with significantly higher frequency than the terms pragmatic markers, discourse particles or pragmatic particles. Finally, DMs also seem to be the choice in most recent publications (e.g. Heine et al., 2021).

2.1.2 Characteristics of discourse markers

Definitions of DMs are probably as numerous as the terminology that refers to them. Although researchers approach and define them from various perspectives, it is possible to say that DMs share some features that can be generalised. Below is the list of typical characteristic features as reflected in the studies of Aijmer (1996, 2002), Brinton (2008), Heine et al. (2021), Schourup (1999), and Yang (2011):

» DMs are preferably used in oral or speech-based discourse;

» although optional, they are highly frequent in use;

» they are syntactically detachable from a sentence;

» they cannot be negated and they cannot become the focus of a cleft sentence;

» they have been grammaticalised, i.e. they resist clear lexical specification and they are propositionally empty;

» they are commonly used in initial position of an utterance (other positions are also possible: as insertions in different positions in the utterance, or as tails or afterthoughts; in more recent terminology we would use the terms left and right periphery of utterances to which they are attached);

» they tend to occur in some sense that is cut off from, or on a higher level than, the rest of the utterance, at the same time though lineary embedded, they tend to modify the utterance as a whole;

» they serve pragmatically based procedural purposes;

» they can be identified by prosody as a ‘separate tone unit’ (this criterion is less safe as DMs may lose their prosodic autonomy and be integrated into the utterance without a tone unit boundary);

» DMs are unusually multifunctional in nature, operating in both the textual and interpersonal domains, see Halliday’s (1979) ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions;

» their functions are flexible and mostly context-retrievable;

» DMs can refer backwards or forwards in the discourse context, i.e. they carry different retrospective or prospective orientation/perspectivisation.

The list is far from complete since it is limited by the standpoints of the above-mentioned authors. My addition to the survey is that DMs can co-occur to create chains; their position in the chains are not prescribed but pragmatically shared.

Schiffrin is considered the first linguist who brought up the importance of DMs. She regarded them as contextual coordinates for utterances and stated that “markers are sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk” (1987, p. 31). Before Schiffrin, there were other linguists who did not directly refer to DMs but recognised the existence of language means that have different function(s) from that of the traditionally identified syntactic elements, e.g. subject, object, verb, adverbial, etc. Their contribution to the field, however, was not so widely recognised. One of those

researchers was a Czech linguist Ivan Poldauf, who wrote a paper on the so-called Third Syntactic Plan (Tárnyiková, 2012, p. 76, Válková, 2012, p. 172). This new level of syntactic analysis could, in his view, cope with structurally dispensable but communicatively relevant items and structures used to convey attitudes, judgements, and involvement of the initiator of communication in event(s), specified by the content of the utterance. In Poldauf (1964), we can find the following:

The third plan has in it components which place the content of the sentence in relation to the individual and his special ability to perceive, judge and assess. An individual has some particular sort of concern in the content of a communication... The concern follows from the individual’s close connection with the matter communicated (which connection may also have an emotional basis) or the matter communicated is what we might call his ‘mental property’. (p. 242)

Since then those language means (referred to as DMs or as any of the above-mentioned terms) have been defined from various points of view, with researchers usually focusing on or stressing selected features of the above-mentioned list. Schourup (1999, pp. 1230-1232), for example, highlights connectivity, optionality, and non-truth-conditionality. Carter and McCarthy (2006, p. 208) speak about “a class of items which operate outside of the structural limits of the clause and which encode speakers’ intentions and interpersonal meanings”. Heine et al. (2021) selected the most important features, omitting those which, according to them, do not conform to all (or majority) of DMs (in some languages, e.g. Korean, DMs do not signal some relationship between clauses, utterances, units of talk, or discourse segments as suggested by Schiffrin). Their definition seems to take care of most of the expressions that have crosslinguistically been classified as DMs and for this reason this definition will be followed in my choice of expressions to be researched.

Discourse markers are (a) invariable expressions which are (b) semantically and syntactically independent from the environment, (c) set off prosodically from the rest of the utterance in some way, and (d) their function is metatextual, being anchored in the situation of discourse and serving the organization of the texts, the attitudes of the speaker and/or speaker-hearer interaction (Heine et al., 2021, p. 6).

2.1.3 Discourse markers discussed in this study

In my previous research, I explained the approach to discourse signposts in general and DMs in particular from a top-down perspective – they are looked upon as a sub-class of a superordinate class within a network of communicatively-regulative units (Leech, 1983). Unlike communicatively-constitutive units whose usage is governed by rules, communicatively-regulative units are principle-controlled. Following Halliday’s (1979) classification of the grammatically relevant units of the semantic system of language, these units can be divided into interpersonal and textual signposts. Ideational component from Halliday’s classification is missing here as it is linked with propositional meaning (for detail and explanation see Válková, 2012, p. 162).

From the above-listed qualities of DMs, the importance of these items for interpersonal communication (both spoken and written) is evident. The original list of the items proposed by Schiffrin (1987), which was heterogeneous in nature and subsumed various connectives (and, or, but) and adverbs (now, then) as well as downgraded clauses (y’know, I mean), is to a certain extent similar to current lists which also tend to mix both interpersonal and textual markers together, usually not following any of the more theoretically-based classifications but rather focusing on functions these items have in discourse (e.g. softening and correcting, sounding less direct, etc.).

To find updated lists with an overview of DMs is not easy since in recent studies researchers mostly focus on small numbers of selected markers. More comprehensive lists of DMs appear for

example in the work of Fung and Carter (2007), who studied the speech of Hong Kong learners and identified 23 markers among the 100 most common English words, or Hasselgreen (2004), who studied the usage of 19 markers among Norwegian students. Carter and McCarthy (2006) introduce a larger variety of expressions in a comprehensive list of pragmatic markers introduced in their corpus-based grammar. DMs in their view belong to the group of pragmatic markers together with stance markers, hedges and interjections, and the whole list is derived from a corpus-based investigation of current language use.

I decided to follow Carter and McCarthy’s (2006) list supplemented by two more extensive sources of DMs, namely the online Cambridge Dictionary1 and Swan’s (2017) list introduced in his 4th edition of Practical English Usage for the quantitative part of this study (see Appendix 1), i.e. to find whether and to what extent Czech speakers of English at B2 level use DMs (i.e. whether they display wide or rather restricted repertoire of the expressions they use). I will search for the expressions that appeared in at least two of the above-mentioned sources, which means that for example many of the interjections introduced in Carter and McCarthy will not be the focus. On the other hand, similarly to Neary-Sungquist, I expect some possibility of finding variations of the expressions I will search for, e.g. sum up or in the end were in Carter and McCarthy’s list while Neary-Sundquist found the variations in sum or all in all due to reading through all of the data.

I am aware of the limitation in terms of the possibility to generalise the results. Different definitions and lists used by researchers in their studies make the generalisations difficult, if not impossible.

1 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/discourse-markersso-right-okay