Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narrative: The Case of English and Catalan

This book presents the multifunctional nature of pragmatic discourse markers in English and Catalan oral narratives from the point of view of text linguistics and contrastive analysis. It is argued that English and Catalan markers are distributed and operate differently at four different levels in the varied discourse structures of the text, i.e. at the ideational, the rhetorical, the sequential, and the inferential levels. The results confirm the distinctions in functional-systemic levels, and indicate that the nature of the two languages has a direct influence on the presence and nature of markers in the texts. The study is built up on a corpus of English and Catalan elicited narratives of native speakers, adopting the sociolinguistic Labovian framework adapted to the situation of educated adults.
The study results in a better understanding of the contribution of pragmatic markers to the organization and the interpretation of oral texts, bringing insights from relevance and cognitive approaches to text structure, and moving from descriptive to theoretical levels of analysis and discussion.