On determinants of discourse marker functions: Grammaticalization and discourse-analytic perspectives

Abstract

Recent research on discourse markers (DMs) has been increasingly paying attention to their hypothesized functional asymmetry depending on their position at left- and right-periphery (LP and RP) and the role of prosody, among others. Drawing upon contemporary corpus data in Korean, this paper argues that the LP/RP position does influence the function, yet it is not uniquely correlated with subjectification/ intersubjectification. It further argues that prosodic features indeed play a crucial role in determining DM functions, yet such prosodic features are not unique in DMs only but are in consonance with the patterns in general language use. In addition to these two determinants, there are other factors such as the semantics of source constructions, which serves as the bases of pragmatic inferences in the discursive and interactional contexts. Since pragmatic inferences are largely based on conceptual metonymy, DM functions form a conceptual network by virtue of their relatedness.