Document Type : Research Paper
Author
Assistant Profesor of Linguistics, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Discourse markers are a group of words or linguistic elements that make connections between the speech segments or sentences without having a role in their semantic meanings. Fraser (2009) divided discourse markers in three groups: elaborative, inferential and contrastive markers. Fraser has considered words such as and,but and soas primary discourse markers. In this study, we investigated all kinds of discourse markers especially the primary discourse markers in Persian conversations. The data were collected from a large Persian telephone conversation database. Thirty conversations for 10 hours and 36 minutes with different topics have been selected,and were analyzed based on Fraser’s classification. The results showed that the discourse markers “va” (and), “vali” (but) and “ba’d” (then) have the highest frequency and are considered as the primary discourse markers in Persian conversations. Moreover, there are other expressions in Persian which are produced through the combination of two discourse markers like “vali khob” (but well) and “va ba’d” (and then). These expressions although were not mentioned by Fraser, have a broad application in Persian and therefore can be considered as compound discourse markers.
Keywords
- Elaborative Markers
- Inferential Markers
- Contrastive Markers
- Primary Discourse Markers
- Fraser’s Classification
- Colloquial Persian
- Sociolinguistics
Main Subjects
)