Bruce Fraser

Boston University | BU

It goes beyond the 1999 article Perspectives on Politeness

While Discourse Markers (DMs) have been studied as individual markers (e.g., but, so, instead), little work has been done on their ability to combine. In this paper I explore what combinations of Contrastive Discourse Markers (CDM) occur in English (e.g., but, on the other hand), what combinations of Implicative Discourse Markers (IDM) occur (e.g.,...

Discourse Markers are usually discussed as terms which signal the relationship between two contiguous sentences, S1—DM—S2 (“We started late. Yet, somehow, we arrived on time.”) In the present paper, I examine the class of English Contrastive Discourse Markers (CDMs) to determine what pairs of them occur acceptably in a sentence (“The health care sy...

This paper examines an understudied area of pragmatic research, namely, the sequencing of Discourse Markers (DMs). Looking only at the sequencing of Contrastive Discourse Markers (CDMs), thereby excluding both Elaborative and Inferential Discourse Markers, it is shown that only “but” may occur as the first with all of the other CDMs, e.g., “But, on...

Community health centers are facing a shortage of primary care physicians at a time when government plans have called for an expansion of community health center programs. To succeed with this expansion, community health centers require additional well-trained physician leadership. Our objective was to ascertain how medical directors obtain leaders...

This chapter looks at hedging as an aspect of pragmatic competence. After describing the evolution of the concept of hedging from 1972 to the present day, it reviews the principal properties of hedges and discusses the relationship between hedging and the discourse effects of vagueness, evasion, equivocation, and politeness. The final part of the c...

Discourse Markers (DMs) have been a topic of research for 30 years under many different names. The 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...

Topic Orientation Markers are proposed as a type of Discourse Management Marker, a fourth type of Pragmatic Marker (PM) (Fraser, 1996). These expressions such as incidentally, before I forget and if I might continue, signal a meta-comment on the structure of the emerging discourse. This paper examines their four uses in discourse (return to a prior...

Literature reviews indicate that the proportion of clinical educational time devoted to bedside teaching ranges from 8% to 19%. Previous studies regarding this paucity have not adequately examined the perspectives of learners. The authors explored learners' attitudes toward bedside teaching, perceptions of barriers, and strategies to increase its f...

Pragmatic Tactics in Mediation Mediation is the process by which a neutral third-party works with disputing parties to assist them in reaching an acceptable, voluntary settlement of their dispute. Mediators are often faced with competing demands over and above those of the dispute itself. For example, establishing and maintaining control of the med...

This book, a tribute to Angela Downing, consists of twenty papers taking a broadly functional perspective on language, with topics ranging from the general (grammar as an evolutionary product, text comprehension, integrative linguistics) to particular aspects of the grammars of languages (Bulgarian, English, Icelandic, Spanish, Swedish). The more s...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Modern Languages. Thesis. 1965. Ph. D.

This collection of 19 papers celebrates the coming of age of the field of politeness studies, now in its 30th year. It begins with an investigation of the meaning of politeness, especially linguistic politeness, and presents a short history of the field of linguistic politeness studies, showing how such studies go beyond the boundaries of conventio...

L'A. discute d'un probleme syntaxique qui a des implications pragmatiques : la position des marqueurs du discours (MD) dans l'enonce. Typiquement ces marqueurs apparaissent entre deux segments S1 et S2. Or certains occupent la position initiale de l'enonce et sont donc suivis du S2 qui ne peut etre interprete comme la continuation d'un enonce d'un...

Professor Ferenc Kiefer of the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was instrumental in bringing early transformational grammar to Europe. His extensive work contributes substantially to making a connection between the grammatical theory and other areas of linguistics. The 17 essays in this book celebrate his career by continu...

This paper is an attempt to clarify the status of discourse markers. These lexical expressions have been studied under various labels, including discourse markers, discourse connectives, discourse operators, pragmatic connectives, sentence connectives, and cue phrases. Although most researchers agree that they are expressions which relate discourse...

This paper considers the act of verbal threatening. I first examine what constitutes a verbal threat, concluding that it involves conveying both the intention to perform an act that the addressee will view unfavourably and the intention to intimidate the addressee. I then compare threatening to promising and warning, and I examine the ways in which...

Discourse markers are briefly introduced. Then, using the concepts of denial and contrast, with modifications, English and Spanish contrastive discourse markers are first analyzed and then contrasted. It was found that they correspond remarkably closely in what they signal about the interpretation of the utterance they introduce.

This paper discusses discourse markers (e.g., "and, so, anyway") and offers an overview of their characteristics and occurrence, using English for illustration. The role of discourse markers is to signal speaker comment on the current utterance. The discourse marker is not part of the sentence's propositional content. While absence of markers does...

Discourse markers are expressions such as now, well, so, however, and then, which signal a sequential relationship between the current basic message and the previous discourse. The purpose of the present paper is to propose that discourse markers be considered a well-defined pragmatic category within the grammar of a language.A framework for senten...

This paper reviews four current approaches to an account of politeness: the social-norm view; the conversational-maxim view; the face-saving view; and the conversational-contract view. A characterization is given for each, followed by a discussion of certain salient aspects of the approach. While none of the views is considered adequate, the face-s...

Investigated comprehension of 20 English idioms by 287 hearing-impaired students (mean age 14.4 yrs) at Reading Levels 1–10, as determined by the Stanford Achievement Test (Hearing Impaired version) or the Metropolitan Reading Readiness Test. Results indicate that when offered a picture that depicts a literal interpretation of the idiom as 1 of 4 r...

The present paper focuses on one aspect of communicative competence—insulting behavior. An insult is defined, techniques for both verbal and non-verbal insulting are discussed, and a variety of areas and values from which insults are drawn are presented. Following this, a brief comparison of insulting terms using animal names in some 10 different l...

Mitigation is defined not as a particular type of speech act but the modification of a speech act: the reduction of certain unwelcome effects which a speech act has on the hearer. Within mitigation there appears to be two types: self-serving and altruistic. These are defined and examples are given. Finally, a variety of strategies used by speakers...

This paper asserts the "unquestionable" relevance of linguistic insights in the training of and subsequent use by teachers of English as a foreign language. Although the author agrees with Chomsky's view that linguistics has nothing to offer the teacher in the form of specific proposals for language teaching methodology, he argues that linguistics...

As mediators we are often faced with sharply conflicting stories. One of the advantages of mediation is that we sometimes can solve the underlying problem without determining who did what, to whom, and when. Indeed, experience has shown that mediation is not a good process for finding the truth because it has none of the tools (such as testimony un...

During the past few months, in preparing for this opportunity to address the 33rd Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Arbitrators, I have been talking with many of you about the role of language in arbitration. Each of you has argued that language is very important in your work, and each of you has, in turn, volunteered suggestions concerning...

The following constitutes some suggestions about how to research DMs. It is not the only way but it may help you get started. First, you should become familiar with the main theoretical orientations within which DMs are analyzed. In Section I of the References below I have listed some of the basic literature, most of it written in English. There ar...

Summary A syntactic analysis procedure is described which obtains directly the deep structure information associated with an input sentence. The implementa­ tion utilizes a state transition network characterizing those linguistic facts representable in a context free form, and a number of techniques to code and derive additional linguistic informat...

Theoretical and practical values of error coefficients useful in bounding the error in integrating periodic analytic functions with the trapezoidal rule are tabulated for various ranges of the parameters.