Cambridge Grammar of English Hardback with cd-rom a comprehensive Guide

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539 Glossary for any unfamiliar terms

From discourse to social contexts | 213

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214 | From discourse to social contexts

Cambridge Grammar of English

COMMON SPOKEN DISCOURSE MARKERS

107

The most frequent discourse markers in spoken English are the single-word items

anyway

, cos, fine, good, great, like, now, oh, okay, right, so, well. 

Some discourse markers (e.g. oh, mind you, right, you know) are restricted to

spoken English or to written reports of speech or written texts imitating a spoken

style. Others, such as well, may occasionally occur in informal writing but are

otherwise exclusive to spoken English.

Discourse markers occur in writing, and some types of marker for organising

written texts are very rare in everyday speech (e.g. the end, section 3, introduction,

in sum

, thirdly). In this chapter we focus only on those markers which are

common in speech.