I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours-2

>Pardon my ignorance, Jim, but what's a discourse marker?
>-kristian- 8-)

No need to apologize for your ignorance;   I know little about these
constituents myself.

From what I understand, these constituents convey information about the
discourse (conversation, text, etc.) rather than standing for things
referred to by words and sentences.

For instance, "ummm," is a discourse marker.   Instead of referring to a
class of ums, it lets the listener know that the speaker wants to hold the
floor but cannot speak further without taking the time to think.

"indeed," "in fact," "by the way," and "so" have been identified as
discourse markers:   they identify bits of the discourse as means of
emphasis, truths, tangental subjects, or statements about the consequences
of things referrred to by previous statements.

There are many other discourse markers, including "oh."

I was hoping to learn more about discourse markers by asking the people on
this list for information.

I figured that the most fun way to do this would be to see what discourse
marker schemes they had.

I have actually started working on a system of discourse markers that seems
fairly novel to me, but I need more information to complete the system.
It won't be an exhaustive system:    discourse gets marked and discourse
rules get communicated in enough ways to fill books that would take me a
long time to read and understand.   But I think I have a small number of
common discourse markers that should suffice for all the stuff I need to
explicate.   (A lot of discourse rules can remain implicit for the purposes
of a basic reference grammar whose primary emphasis is on syntax.)

ANYWAY  (gee, that's a discourse marker too in this context) any help you or
anyone else can give me will be more than appreciated!

Jim