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In:Mathematical Modelling in Linguistics and Text Analysis: Theory and applications
Edited by Adam Pawłowski, Sheila Embleton, Jan Mačutek and Aris Xanthos
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 370] 2025
► pp. 104–117

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Discourse markers’ role in syntactic complexity of sentence structure

A distance-driven case study based on TED talks

ORCiD logo with link | College of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang University of Technology
 | Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University
Published online: 13 October 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.370.09dai
Abstract
Within the theoretical framework of dependency grammar, the current research quantitatively explores the syntactic functionality of Discourse Markers (DMs), specifically focusing on and, but, and so in the discourse of TED talks as the primary subject of analysis. Using the distance-driven metric of Mean Dependency Distance (MDD), we observe that sentences featuring a DM at the onset exhibit heightened syntactic complexity compared to their counterparts without DMs. Beyond demonstrating the syntactic relevance of DMs in natural language sentences, our findings provide insights into the relationship between the syntactic role of DMs and human cognitive processes, suggesting that sentence-initial DMs may tend to coincide with complex syntactic structures, thereby implying the upcoming processing challenges and a heightened cognitive load. Hypothetically, this indicates a potential essential syntactic function of DMs: acting as a preliminary indicator of enhanced processing demands, equivalent to a priming for complex linguistic processing.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Material and methods
    • 2.1Sentence collection and screening
    • 2.2Data processing
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Dependency distance distribution of discourse markers
    • 3.2Syntactic complexity comparison between common sentences
      and target sentences
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (46)
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