The university of South Australia Division of Education, Arts and Social Sciences School of Communication, International Studies and Languages DUC TIEN DO THE USE OF DISCOURSE MARKERS IN MARKING NONCOHERENT TOPIC SHIFTS IN AUSTRALIAN ENGLISH CONVERSATIONS

THE USE OF AND AS A DISCOURSE MARKER IN CONTEXTS OF NONCOHERENT TOPIC SHIFTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS I. An overview of the thesis II. A brief introduction to topic shift III. The use of and as a discourse marker in marking noncoherent topic shifts in conversation III.1. And reintroducing an earlier topic III.2. And introducing a new topic IV. Conclusion

I. An overview of the thesis Thesis title: The use of discourse markers in marking noncoherent topic shifts in conversation Focus: How discourse markers are used to indicate topic changes in conversation Data collection: + A group of twenty students at UniSA who are native speakers of Australian English are asked to participate in the research project and divided into 10 pairs. Each pair has a conversation for about thirty minutes + 10 conversations audiotaped and transcribed as data for my research

II. A brief introduction to topic shift Topic in conversation: what speakers talk about in their conversation Topic shift: the movement from one topic to another Types of topic shift: coherent shift vs noncoherent shift + Coherent shift: topics flow from one to another. The next topic results from the previous one. + Noncoherent shift: topics do not flow from one to another. The next topic is disjunct from the previous one.

III. The use of and as a discourse marker in marking noncoherent topic shifts III.1 And reintroducing an earlier topic And can be used to link a current topic to a previous one, i.e. following the use of and in his/her utterance, a speaker may continue to talk about something which has been mentioned earlier in the talk -Extract 1: J shows his return to his own prior topic (doing photography) following the use of and at the beginning of his turn which is marked by an arrow, “And while I took over a thousand photos […]” -Extract 2: Y shows her return to what her partner (X) has raised before (using Facebook) with the use of and prefacing her turn at arrow c, “And like facebook […]”

And works to show that the next topic is linked to a prior one (not the immediately prior one) → and can be used as “a marker of speaker- continuation: and marks a speaker’s definition of what is being said as a continuation of what had preceded” (Schiffrin, 1987, p150) And marks a speaker’s continuation of a prior topic which has been closed before. This accounts for the use of and as a conjunction in linking two separate parts of the same topic. → The use of and in this situation shows the connection between what is being said and what has been said about the same topic in the talk.

III.2. And introducing a new topic And showing connection between two successive topics The use of and following the termination of the previous topic and preceding the initiation of the next one indicates that they are somehow related to each other though they are noncoherent. Extract 3: the and-prefaced topic as the new one and the immediately prior one both of which are initiated by A can be found to have something in common though they do not flow from one to another + her types of homework (reading the Australian paper and doing Spanish exercises) + her activities over the time: “today” and “tonight” + things for her to do “online”

Schiffrin (1987, p139) TOPIC 1 EVENT EVENT… and TOPIC 2 EVENT

And as “next in series” And marks a speaker’s addition of something new into the talk in the form of “next in series” Extract 4: Y continues talking about some other friends of hers at high school following the use of and at the beginning her turn marked by an arrow (prior to this extract she and her partner have already talked about some of their friends at high school) → And has “additive” meaning (Schiffrin, 1987): the use of and as a conjunction shows the additive relation between what is said following it and what has been said before. → And has “additive”

IV. Conclusion - And can be used to mark a speaker’s return to a prior topic as well as his/her introduction of a new one which is disjunct from the immediately prior one. - The function of and as a conjunction when it is used as a DM to mark topic changes is always reflected as it shows the connection between what is said following it and what has (just) been said before.

REFERENCES Müller, S 2005, Discourse Markers in Native and Non-native English Discourse, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia. Schiffrin, D 1987, Discourse Markers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Schiffrin, D 2006, 'Discourse Markers research and theory: revisiting and', in Approaches to Discourse Particles, ed. K Fischer, Elsevier. Schiffrin, D 2001, 'Discourse Markers: language, meaning and context', in The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. Schiffrin, D et. al, Blackwell Publishers, Malden, MA.

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