2.1. The Conversational Approach

The conversational approach concentrates on the role of discourse markers in the structure of conversation. For example, Schegloff (1984), who called them ‘‘continuers,’’ stated that they are used by the speaker to show the listener that his/her speech forms a coherent whole in progress. In the same vein, Schiffrin provides the following definition: ‘‘markers are sequentially dependent elements that bracket units of talk.’’ Both authors (along with others) agreed on the essentially spoken nature of these elements; from their studies, one is led to conclude that discourse markers are better analyzed from an interactional than from an ideational perspective (following Halliday’s (1994) macrofunctions of language). In fact, Schiffrin pointed out that: ‘‘discourse markers . . . help speakers express interactional alignments toward each other and enact conversational moves’’; elsewhere she stated that the presence of discourse markers in a conversation helps the mechanics of turn-taking, the organization of speech acts, the structuring of discourse ideas, the interactive structure of participants, and the presentation of information.

2.2. The Grammatico-Syntactic Approach

The second model corresponds to the grammatico-syntactic approach to discourse markers. Among others, Knott and Dale described discourse markers as a ‘‘reasonably homogeneous group’’ that tends to be formed by ‘‘simple linguistic expressions [their italics] . . . that have become simplified because they correspond to constructs that are in continual use when we process text.’’ In their description of the elements that can function as ‘cue phrases’ (the authors’ term for discourse markers), they enumerate coordinators, subordinators, conjunct adverbs, and phrases that take sentential complements (e.g., ‘it follows that,’ ‘it may seem that’).

Also following this approach, in a comprehensive account of discourse markers, Fraser explored the characteristics of these elements; discourse markers ‘‘impose a relationship between some aspect of the discourse segment they are a part of, call it S2, and some aspect of a prior discourse segment, call it S1.’’ In other words, this author identified discourse markers with the elements that signal a two-place relationship between adjacent discourse segments, e.g., therefore, however, and, etc., and discards other elements that he calls ‘‘commentary pragmatic markers’’ (e.g., frankly), ‘focus particles’ (e.g., even), ‘pause markers’ (e.g., hum, well), and interjections (e.g., oh). Commentary pragmatic markers, and especially the latter two categories (pause markers and interjections) are most frequently encountered in speech, because they are responsible for the scaffolding of interactional meaning in conversation.

In fact, Fraser considered that the three basic features of discourse markers are the following: they ‘‘do not constitute a separate syntactic category,’’ their meaning is ‘‘procedural not conceptual’’ and, ‘‘every individual discourse marker has a specific, core meaning’’. This view somehow contradicts Schiffrin’s argument that not all markers have meanings; Fraser specifically mentioned the markers oh and well which, incidentally, are very common in English.