Bernd Heine, Gunther Kaltenböck, Tania Kuteva & Haiping Long, The rise of discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. xi + 308.

Abstract

The Rise of Discourse Markers, by Bernd Heine, Gunther Kaltenböck, Tania Kuteva and Haiping Long, is an outstanding reference work for any linguist interested in discourse and language change. It provides a review of the scattered literature describing the role and evolution of discourse markers (henceforth DMs) in several languages, as well as a clear synthesis of the most recent developments in the theories of language change. Even though DMs are indispensable, pervasive tools in everyday conversations, they had been neglected by several generations of grammarians, before becoming a vibrant field of study in the past three decades. The functions of DMs are notoriously difficult to investigate, which has led linguists to develop new analytical frameworks. The various, overlapping terminologies and concepts that have emerged to account for the behaviour of DMs make the literature particularly challenging to unravel. This challenge was successfully taken up by the four authors, and The Rise of Discourse Markers will answer many questions of any researcher who has been waiting for a work making sense of the heterogeneous contributions to the field.The book contains the following five sections: