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 ...

Discourse relations—both explicit, as marked by connectives and cue phrases, and implicit through juxtaposed text segments—are integral to the coherent interpretation and processing of language. These ...

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 ...