A Case Study on the Pragmatic Use of Discourse Markers

Earlier linguists have exerted great efforts into syntactic and semantic analyses of discourse markers (hereafter DMs). While the importance of the pragmatic appropriateness and interpersonal adaptation DMs attached to the discourse are inadequately discussed. In analyzing the use of DMs in selected conversations, this paper attempts to demonstrate that the use of DMs is very important for the pragmatic competence of a speaker