Abstract:
This paper investigates the use of discourse markers in two commencement
speeches given by American and Georgian speakers from the perspective of Pragmatics.
The study is specifically based on Fraser’s taxonomy of discourse markers
according to their pragmatic and metalinguistic functions. This theoretical framework
is concerned with language in use, giving more importance to the context than
to the text of utterances. The article discusses: (1) DMs (discourse markers) used
in this specific discourse; (2) provides a thorough analysis of the addresser’s communicative
intentions based on their choice of DMs (discourse markers); (3) identifies main functional (and linguistic) characteristics of English DMs in comparison
to their selected Georgian compatible equivalents. The empirical study (the case of
two randomly chosen speeches of American and Georgian speakers) revealed the
similarity of the syntactic and linguistic characteristics of the DMs in both languages.
They could be presented by Fraser’s contrastive discourse markers syntactic patterns
S1, DM+S2, S1.DM+S2. DMs have only the procedural meaning and they do not
invest in the semantic meanings of the utterances that host them. The grammar-pragmatic
analysis of chosen discourse markers revealed the variety of relations between
the segments of the discourse. DMs but/ [magram], and/ [da], so/ [ase rom] present
diff erent pragmatic categories – contrastive, elaborative and inferential types of DMs
and they imply diff erent variety of pragmatic functions/sub-functions:
But/ [magram] – direct contrast, indirect contrast, violation of expectation, indirect
violation of expectation, correction, qualification, opener, topic/focus changer.
And/ [da] – focus marker, adding more details to the provided information, elaborative
marker between discourse segments, gap/pause filler.
So/ [ase rom] – result and consequence marker, main idea marker, summarizing/
rewording/ giving an example, boundary marker, question or request marker.
