Procedural meanings of well in a corpus of Xhosa English

Annotating discourse markers in spontaneous speech corpora on an example for the Slovenian language

“…Examples are utterance-initial usages of but, therefore, in conclusion, to the contrary, still, however, anyway, well, besides, actually, all in all, so, after all, and so on. It is generally conceded that such words have at least a component of meaning that resists truth-conditional treatment /.../ What they seem to do is indicate, often in a very complex ways, just how the utterance that contains them is a response to, or a continuation of, some portion of the prior discourse.« In discourse studies, there has been increasing interest in discourse markers over the past decades, not only in English but many languages worldwide, as can be seen from the number of articles (e.g., Redeker 1990;Fraser 1996;Swerts 1998;Kroon 1998;Fox Tree and Schrock 1999;Montes 1999;Andersen et al 1999;Archakis 2001;Matsui 2001;Schourup 2001;Norrick 2001;Vlemings 2003;Fuller 2003;Fukushima 2004;de Klerk 2004;Tagliamonte 2005;Dedaić 2005;Tchizmarova 2005), special issues (e.g., Discourse Processes, 1997 (24/1); Journal of Pragmatics, 1999 (31/10)), workshops (e.g., Workshop on Discourse Markers, Egmond aan Zee, Nederlands, January 1995; COLING-ACL Workshop on Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers, Montreal, Canada, August 1998), and books (e.g., Schiffrin 1987;Jucker and Ziv 1998;Blakemore 2002) on the subject.…”

Perceptions of Iranian English Language Teachers towards the Use of Discourse Markers in the EFL Classroom

“…Factor two named identification with the native speaker norm and contained items (31, 32, 33, 42, 43, 44, 48). Factor three named pragmatic (however, in this study this category is named practical) value of DMs is comprised of the value of the following items (1,2,3,7,12,27,29,30). Factor four named dispensable value of DMs and they are composed of these items (4,5,6,8,10,11,13).…”

Automatic identification of discourse markers in dialogues: An in-depth study of like and well

“…As a DM, the role of well is, broadly speaking, to "signal that the context created by an utterance may not be the most relevant one for the interpretation of the next utterance" (Jucker, 1993, page 450). Four specific functions of the DM well have been identified in the literature (Jucker, 1993;Schourup, 2001;de Klerk, 2005), again illustrated below with examples from the ICSI-MR corpus. In (6), well conveys some kind of insufficiency, showing that a background assumption of speaker A is not entirely adequate, and B cannot answer A's question without denying that assumption first; in (7), well is a "face-threat mitigator" which helps to disagree politely; in (8), well introduces an instance of reported speech, while in (9) it marks hesitation.…”

“…11,000 words), and found 0.55% and 0.62% for DM like, and respectively 0.36% and 0.55% for DM well. In a corpus of non-native English speakers, de Klerk (2005Klerk ( , p. 1189Klerk ( -1190 found 788 uses of well over 540,000 words, of which 494 (62.6% or 0.09% of all words) were DMs. In a 50,000 word sample of the London-Lund Corpus, we found 500 occurrences of well, of which 87.4% were DMs (0.87% of all words).…”

“…de Klerk, 2005Klerk, , p. 1190. In the present study, we defined a range of possible lexical features, and allowed DM classifiers to make optimal use of them after learning over the training data.…”