Step 1: Pick a discourse/pragmatic marker that you are interested in examining. This could be a single word (e.g., anyway, yeah) or a parenthetical marker (e.g., I mean, I dunno).

Note: You will build on this assignment for HW5 so make sure to choose a marker you are interested in.

Step 2: Collect 10 tokens of the discourse marker from language use. You can use social media (e.g., Twitter), television shows/video recordings, or a corpus (e.g., COCA) to collect your data.

Step 3: Write down each example (with context) and include the following information.

1. Write down the full utterance in which the discourse/pragmatic marker is used. The term utterance for our purposes refers to any spoken, signed, or written sentence-like unit.
2. Also include the utterance that comes directly before the utterance with the discourse marker and the utterance that comes directly after. You must show context for credit.

• Be aware that the preceding and following utterance might come from a different person/language user in a different turn. You should include the preceding/following utterances even if it is across turns, clarifying that it falls across turns. If there is no other context than the utterance with the discourse marker, such as with a single utterance tweet, make that clear in your assignment.

Note: You are only required to transcribe segmental content (words) but you are welcome to indicate significant pauses or other suprasegmental properties of the utterance if you think the property is relevant to the use of the discourse marker OR if you have a general interest/experience in doing so. You should transcribe false start (th- the) or hesitation markers (um, uh, er) if they occur immediately next to the discourse marker you are investigating.

If you choose to look at a discourse marker from a language other than English, you will need to translate each utterance into English while also transcribing the example in the source language. You don’t have to translate the discourse marker word into English.

Step 4: Under each example/token, analyze and describe the function you think the discourse/pragmatic marker is serving based upon the linguistic context in which it is used. In your analysis you should include the following information:

1. What function(s) is the discourse marker serving in each example? What evidence is there in the linguistic context to support your analysis? Show evidence. I want to see what motivated your analysis/interpretation for each example.
   • Here are some common functions of discourse markers (there are many more): discourse connectors, turn-takers, attitude markers, epistemic markers (signaling degree of commitment to what you are saying), confirmation-seekers, intimacy signals, topic-switchers, hesitation markers, fillers (speech planning), elaborators or reformulators, repair markers, focus markers, and hedging/mitigating devices.
   • You can use existing research on your discourse marker if you need help identifying functions but make sure to cite any sources you use.
2. For each example, state whether the marker seems to be serving more of an information structuring function (e.g. showing coherence relations across the discourse) or more of an interactional function (marking something about the speech participants or the interaction itself). Explain your response.

• You should expect the marker to serve different functions on different occasions of use, but you might find it being used similarly across some of the tokens/examples. You might also find that it is simultaneously multifunctional (serving more than one function at once).