discoursemarking

Discourse marking, sometimes written as discoursemarking, is the use of linguistic resources to structure discourse beyond the interpretation of individual sentences. It covers devices that signal relationships between utterances, indicate stance, manage topic and focus, and help listeners recover coherence. The term can refer to the broader phenomenon of discourse-level marking as well as to the specific items called discourse markers. Discourse markers are often short items—words or phrases—that carry little propositional content but serve a discourse function. They include lexical particles such as well, anyway, and you know; conjunctive words such as therefore and however; and phrases like I mean or you see.

Functions include signaling topic continuity or shift, marking contrast or consequence, indicating a speaker's attitude or stance, organizing sequencing, and signaling givenness or new information. They can modulate emphasis, delay, or repair miscommunications within dialogue. Discourse marking also involves prosody and punctuation; intonation, pause, and sentence boundary punctuation can serve similar functions to lexical markers in organizing talk.

Cross-linguistically, languages differ in the inventory and use of discourse markers. Some languages rely heavily on dedicated discourse particles; others use intonation or syntactic structure to manage discourse. Researchers study discourse marking with corpus analysis, conversation analysis, experimental pragmatics, and cross-language comparison.

Applications include analysis of spoken interaction, language teaching and learning, and natural language processing. Understanding discourse markers aids interpretation of coherence, stance, and pragmatic meaning in speech and writing.