Discourse Structuring Markers in English

“The book constitutes a highly welcome addition to the existing literature on DMs, supplementing previous accounts in important ways. Incorporating earlier findings made in work on construction grammar, it offers a wealth of information on all synchronic and diachronic aspects of DSMs and enriches our knowledge of DMs with a new perspective and a new approach. The observations made are supported by many examples and present an important resource for students of English, linguistics, and pragmatics.”

“This volume yields illuminating insight into a hitherto an underexplored area of conventionalized pragmatics within CxG, and takes a refreshing angle on DMs. The book is well-grounded and worthwhile on a number of grounds. Firstly, it is very well-written and enlightening since chapters are structurally and thematically related and mirror one another. Secondly, each chapter includes both an introduction and a summary, serving to reinforce readers’ understanding. Avoiding undue redundancy, the summaries provided are concise. Thirdly, as the book is furnished with a selective and highly pertinent review of literature followed by corpus-based and authentic examples, it strikes a good balance between theoretical and practical aspects of DMs. Therefore, it provides adequate information for those seeking to gain theoretically as well as those seeking incentive for their own research. Due mainly to fresh, thought-provoking quality content, this book constitutes an extremely rich contribution on DMs and CxG. Moreover, introducing a new approach and imparting a great deal of information on synchronic and diachronic aspects of DSMs/DMs, this monograph will be engaging for scholars and students of CxG and pragmatics.”

“This book is an important and thought-provoking contribution to historical constructional grammar combining the discussion of theoretical issues with the empirical analysis of a specific type of discourse markers. It is convincingly shown that pragmatics and discourse factors need to be incorporated into constructional models accounting for the rise of monofunctional DSMs (and multifunctional DMs) in English. Specifically, the network formalism makes it possible to describe the pragmatic and discourse-functional constraints on the changes undergone by the DSMs in a systematic way. The view of language change in this book is supported by the analysis of a number of case studies of different types of DSMs. These studies are particularly revealing because they are based on corpora and corpus-linguistic methods which are likely to have a key role in future developments in constructionalist historical pragmatics.”