International Review of Pragmatics 1 (2009) 293–320 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI 10.1163/187730909X12538045489818 brill.nl/irp An Account of Discourse Markers Bruce Fraser Boston University, USA bfraser@bu.edu Abstract Discourse Markers (DMs) have been a topic of research for 30 years under many different names. he present paper presents an account of one view of DMs with the aim of providing researchers in the field with a coherent definition of DMs and a presentation of the syntactic and semantic properties of this functional category that will enable them to compare their work on DMs with other researchers. In addition, an analysis of the uses of the DM but supports the claim that there is one core meaning relationship, contrast, with the interpretation of the more than 10 different uses of but being signalled by context and pragmatic elaboration. Keywords Discourse Markers (DMs), procedural meaning, pragmatic markers, pragmatic elaboration …though prepositions and conjunctions, etc. are names well known in grammar, and the particles contained under them carefully ranked into their distinct sub- divisions; yet he who would show the right use of particles, and what significance and force they have, must take a little more pains, enter into their own thoughts, and observe nicely the several postures of his mind in discoursing…neither is it enough, for the explaining of these words, to render them, as is usual in dictionar- ies, by words of another tongue which come nearest to their signification; for what is meant by them is commonly as hard to be understood in one as another language. hey are all marks of some action or intimation of the mind; and there- fore to understand them rightly, the several views, postures, stands, turns, limita- tions, and exceptions, and several other thoughts of the mind for which we have either none or very deficient names, are diligently to be studied (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1959: 521). 1. Introduction his paper presents an account of Discourse Markers (DMs), lexical expres- sions such as those in italics in the following examples. 1 1 Most of the examples in this paper are constructed rather than taken from corpora.