Discourse marker sequences: Insights into the serial order of communicative tasks in real-time turn production

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates the linearization order of English discourse markers (DMs) in two- and multipart sequences at the beginning and the end of turns-at-talk in unplanned conversations, e.g. well I mean you know or yeah but actually. Based on statistical measures of the probability of individual DMs to occur first in all possible combinations involving 26 different DMs it will be shown that the order of DMs has a functional motivation and can be interpreted as reflecting the temporal order of communicative tasks that speakers deal with when opening or closing a turn.