Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

CHAPTER THREE
Negotiation of meaning when establishing coherence:
The case of 
I mean
 in academic spoken discourse
Renata Povolná
Abstract
The permanent negotiation of meaning between all discourse participants is an important 
condition for successful communication in any spoken interaction, including interaction 
used in academic settings (cf. Povolná 2009, 2010). Many linguistic features typical above 
all of the spoken variety of the language operate in the negotiation of meaning between 
discourse participants and thus enhance the establishment and maintenance of discourse 
coherence. 
One of the features typical of spoken discourse which can participate in the negotiation of 
meaning is the frequent use of what is probably most typically labelled ‘discourse markers’ 
(e.g. Schiffrin 1987, Fraser 1990, 1999, Stenström 1994, Lenk 1995, 1998, Jucker and Ziv 
1998, Biber et al. 1999, Aijmer 1996, 2002). In spite of the fact that discourse markers 
“generally contribute little, if anything, to the propositional content of the utterance” into 
which they are inserted (Stenström 1990: 137), they are crucial for the meaning mediated 
by speech because they perform various pragmatic functions; for example, they express 
the speaker’s intentions, feelings and emotions, and also the speaker’s attitude towards the 
addressee or the situation under discussion. That is the reason why the aim of this chapter 
is to discuss and exemplify possible pragmatic functions of one of these markers, namely 
I mean
, and to illustrate how this marker can enable the negotiation of meaning between 
participants in academic spoken interaction and whether it can also contribute to discourse 
coherence, which is understood here as a dynamic interpretative hearer/reader-oriented, 
comprehension-based and context-dependent notion (cf. Bublitz 1988, 1999).
While approaching her language data from a
pragmatic and discourse-analytic perspective 
and by using both qualitative and quantitative methods, the author offers results from her 
research into authentic texts representing academic spoken discourse taken from 
Michigan 
Corpus of Academic Spoken English
(MICASE) and attempts to provide evidence for her 
assumption that the marker 
I mean
can be used to enhance the smooth 
flow of 
spoken 
interaction and thus the establishing of discourse coherence.

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