Discourse Markers in Children's Narratives: The Cases of (and) then and so

Abstract

Choi, InJi. 2010. Discourse Markers in Children's Narratives: The Cases of (and) then and so. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 35-1, 247-264. Discourse markers have frequently been described as a means to guide the hearer to the inferential procedure that yields the intended interpretation. However, there is a disagreement as to whether the usage of discourse markers contributes to the coherence that the speaker wishes to establish or whether they are just a means to identify relevance for the minimum processing cost. This requires a closer examination of actual uses of discourse markers. For this purpose, children's uses of (and) then and so in narratives were analyzed. This paper shows that (and) then and so serve multiple functions which provide instructions to the hearer about how to understand the utterance they introduce in relation to the previous context, and that there is a shift in the use of these markers across ages. This paper also demonstrates that the phenomenon of discourse markers can be adequately explained within the relevance theory framework (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995; Blakemore 2002). (Sookmyung Women's University)