Discourse Markers in Political Speeches

Abstract

In English language, discourse markers are commonly used as terms to refer to heterogeneous class of expressions which make syntactic distinctions by their function and the kind of meaning they encode in discourse (Horn and Ward, 2006: 221). The current study endeavors to answer the following questions: (1) what are discourse markers? (2) what are the roles of these expressions in discourse? (3) for the presence of pragmatic meaning, do they show a role in arguments? (4) how do they function in political speeches? (5) what is the frequency of each of the categories of discourse markers in the two selected speeches by Donald Trump (2016)? Answering these questions to attain the study aims is done through the subsequent procedures: (1) presenting a theoretical background about discourse markers, their functions in discourse, and their roles in interpretation, (2) developing a model according to which the two selected speeches will be analyzed in terms of the purposes of the used discourse markers, (3) applying the model to the data under investigation through analyzing the function of each marker in the selected extracts from each speech, and (4) making a statistic analysis to show the frequency of the most widely used category of discourse markers in the two speeches under study.