Discourse Markers Used by Non-Native Speakers in Good Morning America Talk Show

Discourse markers have been studied extensively in linguistics and communication studies. Its use is very helpful in understanding the message conveyed, both in formal and informal situations.  This study examines the discourse markers used by non-native speakers in Good Morning America Talk Show. Unveil the types and their functions, this study uses a qualitative descriptive method in identifying the use of discourse markers. The data were taken from conversations of non-native speakers using Biber et al (1999) theory to determine the types and functions of discourse markers. The results of this study showed that there are ten types of discourse markers interjection, greetings and farewells, linking adverbials, stance adverbials, vocatives, response elicitors, response forms, hesitators, various polite speech-act formulas and expletives. Those markers have variations functions as marker of information management, marker of response, marker of connectives, marker of cause and effect, marker of temporal adverb and marker of information participation. This study has shown that the use of discourse markers varies across languages and cultures. Moreover, the use of discourse markers can also vary depending on the context of the communication.Penanda wacana telah dipelajari secara luas dalam studi bidang linguistik dan komunikasi. Penggunaanya sangat membantu dalam memahami pesan yang disampaikan, baik disituasi formal ataupun informal. Penelitian ini mengacu pada penggunaan penanda wacana yang digunakan oleh non -penutur asli di acara gelar wicara Good Morning America. Untuk mengetahui tipe-tipe dan fungsinya, penelitian ini menggunakan metode deskriptif kualitatif dalam mengidentifikasi penggunaan penanda wacana dalam konteks percakapan. Data penelitian diperoleh dari percakapan non-penutur asli dengan menggunakan teori Biber et al (1999) dalam menentukan setiap jenis dan fungsinya. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan terdapat sepuluh penanda wacana yaitu interjection, greetings and farewells, linking adverials, stance adverbials, vocatives, response elicitiors, respon forms, hesitators, various-polite speech act, dan expletives. Penanda-penanda tersebut memiliki fungsi yang bervariasi, diantaranya sebagai marker of information management, marker of response, marker of connetives, marker of cause and effect, marker of temporal adverb, dan marker of information-participation. Penelitian ini telah menunjukkan bahwa penggunaan penanda wacana bervariasi antar bahasa dan budaya. Selain itu, penggunaan penanda wacana juga dapat bervariasi tergantung pada konteks komunikasi

Modal Markers in Japanese: A Study of Learners’ Use before and after Study Abroad

Japanese discourse requires speakers to index, in a relatively explicit manner, their stance toward the propositional information as well as the hearer. This is done, among other things, by means of a grammaticalized set of modal markers. Although previous research suggests that the use of modal expressions by second language learners differs from that of native users, little is known about “typical” native or non-native behavior. This study aims (a) to delineate native and non-native usage by a quantitative examination of a broad range of Japanese modal categories, and qualitative analyses of a subset of potentially problematic categories among them, and (b) to identify possible developmental trajectories, by means of a longitudinal observation of learners’ verbal production before and after study abroad in Japan. We find that modal categories realized by non- transparent or non-salient markers (e.g., explanatory modality no da, or utterance modality sentence-final particles) pose particular challenges in spite of their relatively high availability in the input, and we discuss this finding in terms of processing constraints that arguably affect learners’ acquisition of the grammaticalized modal markers

Aspect and Modality in Indonesian the Case of Sudah, Telah, Pernah, and Sempat

In this paper, I describe four Indonesian aspect markers, sudah, telah, pernah, and sempat, showing that the main opposition between them relies not only on their aspectual meanings, but also on the various modalities they express. The opposition between the very frequent markers sudah and telah is analysed in detail. The syntactic and semantic survey shows that these two markers are not synonyms in most contexts

The modal particle ma 嘛: theoretical frames, analysis and interpretive perspectives

This article sets out to provide a semantic and pragmatic account of the modal particle ma 嘛, endeavouring to put into light new aspects in its function which, at present, remain widely unexplored in the literature. It presents an analysis of the particle ma by interrogating a written and a spoken corpus, showing how the semantic and the pragmatic levels are tightly interweaved in the functioning of ma: the results supported my hypothesis that the particle is plausibly a marker of interpersonal evidentiality (IE), a category set up by Tantucci (2013), used to signal a socially acknowledged piece of information, playing a fundamental role in the expression of politeness by safeguarding the interlocutors’ face; consequently, ma is always used with information that has an active or accessible status in the interlocutors’ mind and that is always pragmatically salient, independently of its position (at the end or inside the sentence), marking a Topic or a Focus. The particle performs pragmatic functions close to the ones of discourse markers since it increases the relevance of the marked information to the context, therefore also playing a contributing role in the coherence of discourse

Aspect and Modality in Indonesian the Case of Sudah, Telah, Pernah, and Sempat

In this paper, I describe four Indonesian aspect markers, sudah, telah, pernah, and sempat, showing that the main opposition between them relies not only on their aspectual meanings, but also on the various modalities they express. The opposition between the very frequent markers sudah and telah is analysed in detail. The syntactic and semantic survey shows that these two markers are not synonyms in most contexts

Intonation and discourse : biased questions

This paper surveys a range of constructions in which prosody affects discourse function and discourse structure.We discuss English tag questions, negative polar questions, and what we call “focus” questions. We postulate that these question types are complex speech acts and outline an analysis in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) to account for the interactions between prosody and discourse

Anaphora and Discourse Structure

We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics, and reveals multiple ways in which the relational meaning conveyed by adverbial connectives can interact with that associated with discourse structure. We conclude by sketching out a lexicalised grammar for discourse that facilitates discourse interpretation as a product of compositional rules, anaphor resolution and inference.Comment: 45 pages, 17 figures. Revised resubmission to Computational Linguistic