The present case study takes a discourse-pragmatic approach to some of the most frequently used discourse markers (henceforth DMs) in spoken English: I mean, of course, oh, well, I think and you know. The point of departure in this research is a set of discourse-pragmatic relations and functions, such as conversation management, thematic control, concession, elaboration, reformulation, ventriloquizing, and marking evidentiality. After looking at which DMs signal these relations and functions in our corpora, we identify a set of English DMs whose members display markedly different pragmatic behaviours across various subgenres of spoken English such as naturally-occurring conversations and mediatised political interviews. We examine their use in a corpus of political interviews broadcast in English by the BBC and CNN between 2003 and 2011, and compare our results with previous research, performed on the basis of spontaneous, everyday conversations. Our paper has a threefold goal: (1) to present examples of the various discourse-organizing roles and strategic uses of the DMs; (2) to discuss the differences between the selected English DMs' functions across different subgenres of spoken English discourse; and (3) to answer whether or not the uses of the selected discourse markers differ across the various discourse types/genres (spoken English vs. different types of political interviews).

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Pragmatic markers comprise a functional class of linguistic items that do not typically change the propositional meaning of an utterance but are essential for the organization and structuring of discourse, for marking the speaker's attitudes to the proposition being expressed as well as for facilitating processes of pragmatic inferences. Pragmatic marker research has been characterised by descriptive approaches: even case studies that take their data from political discourse tend to focus on linguistic patterns of co-occurrence and sequentiality rather than social-institutional norms or broader societal concerns. The novelty of this article is, therefore, in linking pragmatic marker research, a primarily discourse analytical, language-oriented field to the broader field of Discourse Studies with a focus on manipulative social practices and their manifestations in discursive strategies. This article analyses evidential markers, general extenders, quotation markers and markers of (un)certainty 1 in political interviews broadcasted by the BBC, CNN and Hungarian ATV. After a short overview of the formal and functional characteristics of pragmatic markers and their relevance to Discourse Studies in general and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) research in particular, characteristics of the political interview as political discourse, institutional discourse and media(tised) discourse are discussed. In the second part, the results of previous (primarily descriptive and genre analytical) research are reconsidered from the perspective of CDA and particular pragmatic markers are associated with manifestations of manipulative intent, such as suppression, polarization, recontextualising, conversationalisation and intended ambiguity. An important finding of this study is that a single pragmatic marker can serve several manipulative functions, while a given manipulative strategy is potentially realized by a variety of pragmatic items. Potential manipulative uses are exemplified with a view to applying the heuristic to the analysis of representations of particular political events and happenings, which is a direction for further research.

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