MOST conversations in speaking or writing contexts are usually prefaced with discourse markers. Why is this fitting, and why are discourse markers inevitable in communication? This article discusses ...

Spoken language, especially spoken German, is rich in particles that do not contribute to the propositional content of utterances, but play important roles in steering the flow of the dialogue and in ...

Um, don’t you get, you know, annoyed by verbal clutter? Nothing sinks a public speaker quicker than an overdose of ums and uhs. Professional yakkers are expected to purge their speech of such lexical ...