The Classification of the Discourse Markers to Introduce New Topics

From the Viewpoint of Discourse Comprehension

Abstract

This paper aims to classify discourse markers in Japanese, by their function in introducing a new topic as clues for a listener to comprehend conversational discourse. The author collected the markers from 47 chats (13 hours 40 minutes total) by Japanese native speakers, contained in the Corpus of Spoken Japanese by Basic Transcription System for Japanese, and classified them into the following three categories by the types of information that a listener can understand from them: 1) Speaker’s perceptions about the coherence relations between discourses; 2) Speaker’s attitudes toward the matters of the discourse; 3) Speaker’s mental operations. Of these categories, 1 and 2 can be each divided into two subcategories: 1a) Logical relations between discourses; 1b) Reasons to introduce the following utterance (s); 2a) Attitudes toward the matters of the previous utterance (s); 2b) Attitudes toward the matters of the following utterance (s).