markeroften

Markeroften is a neologism used in corpus linguistics to describe the tendency for discourse markers to appear with high frequency within a text or across a corpus. The term is not widely standardized and its usage varies between studies, sometimes functioning as a technical metric and other times as a descriptive label.

Etymology and sense. The word combines “marker” with “often” to signal that a given text or genre exhibits a relatively high occurrence of markers such as well, so, however, you know, and other boundary or stance indicators. It is typically used as a descriptive property rather than a fixed category, and its exact definition may differ among researchers.

Definition and measurement. Markeroften refers to a statistical property that quantifies the frequency of a predefined list of discourse markers relative to total tokens. Common measures include marker density (markers per thousand words) and marker rate (markers per sentence or per 1,000 words). Researchers may compute markeroften for individual documents, sections, or entire corpora, and compare across genres or languages.

Calculation and interpretation. To compute markeroften, select a list of markers, count their occurrences, and normalize by corpus size. The result is used to characterize texts, reveal stylistic tendencies, or support comparisons between registers, genres, or time periods. A higher markeroften value often correlates with more overt signaling of stance, cohesion, or discourse structure.

Applications and limitations. Markeroften can aid genre analysis, readability assessment, and authorship attribution, particularly in conversational vs. formal prose. Limitations include ambiguity in what counts as a marker, cross-linguistic variation, and the lack of a standardized methodology or thresholds across studies.

See also: discourse marker, corpus linguistics, frequency analysis, text classification.