Current Trends in Discourse Marker Research

Dear Colleagues,

Discourse markers (henceforth, DMs) have been the focus of countless studies for the past 50 years or so, ranging from descriptive analyses of their form, function, and distribution to predictive and experimental accounts of the factors that impact their use. Because of their diversity and high frequency, DMs such as so, like, or well in English raise a number of questions and challenges, which can be addressed from many angles, including those of semantics, syntax, psycholinguistics, diachronic linguistics, and sociolinguistics. The abundance of literature from all these disciplines, in many languages from around the world, has led to a strong and dynamic research field.

Recent years have seen the emergence of new topics related to DMs, such as their co-occurrence (Pons Bordería 2018), their use as processing cues (van Bergen and Bosker 2018), their interactions with other discourse-signaling devices (Hoek et al. 2019), or multimodal gesture–DM combinations (Inbar and Maschler 2023). Although this productivity is beneficial to the field, it also makes it difficult to keep up to date with the newest developments and trends. In particular, DMs are regularly integrated into previously unrelated research topics and applications, such as conversational alignment (Knudsen et al. 2020), word recognition (Bosker et al. 2021), healthcare discourse (Han et al. 2020), or human–machine interactions (Vasilescu et al. 2010). The purpose of this Special Issue is, therefore, to present a selection of new trends in DM research, focusing on studies that innovate in terms of their topic, theoretical approach, and/or methodology. Rather than a classic state-of-the-art overview, this Special Issue intends to draw attention to emerging topics and possibly foster interest in under-studied areas related to DMs. To this end, we welcome contributions that explore a new perspective and break new ground with respect to the existing body of research on DMs.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editor (ludivine.crible@ugent.be) or to Languages editorial office (languages@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editor for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Tentative Completion Schedule
Abstract Submission Deadline : 15 Sep 2024    
Notification of Abstract Acceptance : 15 Oct 2024    
Full Manuscript Deadline : 15 April 2025    

References

Bosker, H. R., Badaya, E. & Corley, M. (2021). Discourse markers activate their, like, cohort competitors. Discourse Processes, 58(9), 837-851.

Han, Y., Segalowitz, N., Khalil, L., Kehayia, E., Turner, C. & Gatbonton, E. (2020). Do nurses use discourse markers differently when using their second language as opposed to their first while interviewing patients? Canadian Modern Language Review, 76(2), 91-113.

Hoek, J., Zufferey, S., Evers-Vermeul, J., & Sanders, T. J. M. (2019). The linguistic marking of coherence relations: Interactions between connectives and segment-internal elements. Pragmatics & Cognition, 25(2), 275–309.

Inbar, A. & Maschler, Y. (2023). Shared knowledge as an account for disaffiliative moves : Hebrew ki ‘because’-clauses accompanied by the palm-up open-hand gesture. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 56(2), 141-164.

Knudsen, B., Creemers, A. & Meyer, A. S. (2020). Forgotten little words: How backchannels and particles may facilitate speech planning in conversation? Frontiers in Psychology 11, e: 593671.

Pons Bordería, S. (2018). The combination of discourse markers in spontaneous conversations: keys to undo a gordian knot. Revue Romane 53(1), 121-158.

van Bergen, G. & Bosker, H. R. (2018). Linguistic expectation management in online discourse processing: An investigation of Dutch inderdaad ‘indeed’ and eigenlijk ‘actually’. Journal of Memory and Language, 103, 191-209.

Vasilescu, I., Rosset, S. and Adda-Decker, M. (2010). On the role of discourse markers in interactive spoken question answering systems. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Valetta, Malta.

Dr. Ludivine Crible
Guest Editor

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• discourse markers
• corpus
• experimental
• interaction
• processing
• pragmatics