A Pragmatic Analysis of Co-occurrence of Discourse Markers in texts: Pragmaticalization of Fuunctions

In production and interpretation of discourse, interlucutors apply discourse markers (DMs) to establish and discover the relationship between discourse units (Crible & Dagand, 2019; Mohammadi & Radjaee, 2020; Schiffrin, 1987). DMs offer metadiscoursive instructions for the interpretation of discourse by the audience. This interactive process is activated through different types of metacommunicative knowledges and skills. Part of this experience embraces knowledge of text to employ grammatical and lexical elements to convey meaning. More important aspect of this faculty is related to metalanguage involving the capability to communicate different individual and social characteristics, to utilize language to communicate feelings, thoughts, and negotiate meaning (Maschler & Schiffrin, 2015). The analysis of DMs co-occurrences and combinations as a metadiscursive strategy can help researchers to predict specific possible patterns of DMs’ categorizations and such empirical and pragmatic findings will build up some foundations for future typological exploration as well as for the theorization of DM co-occurrences and collocations in general (Kassaei & Amouzadeh, 2020). Moreover, research in the area of language fluency has substantiated the positive influence of DMs investigation and analysis on second language acquisition and opens new horizons towards cognitive processes of discourse production and comprehension (Crible & Dagand,2019; Crible & Pascal, 2020). Based on DMs’ combinations sensitivity to contextual variables in real life situations, they develop novel interactive pragmatic strategies in communication in terms of emphasis, fluency of communication, and intimacy among the interlocutors (Jucker & Ziv, 1998). Consequently, the present researcher tried to investigate and compare the uses and pragmatic functions of co-occurrences of DMs in Arabic, English, and Persian texts.