Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

S1
 as opposed to what? where are they supposed to come from?
S2
well
no no no, I’m saying that, people who either, speak German and 
live in the United States, are native speakers of German who live in the 
United States, rather than, my native speakers of German coming from 
Switzerland and my native speakers of Chinese coming from Ann Arbor
S1
well 
I mean
 you’re not going to be able, to distinguish, the part that’s, 
that’s due to German and the part that’s due to American culture?
S2
exactly.
Example (6) illustrates 
I mean
used to introduce explanation. As stated in 
Table 3-1, it has 54 occurrences in my material, thus being the most common 
function of all recognized in this chapter. Its normalized frequency rate in the 
corpus as a whole amounts to 1.14 tokens per 1,000 words; in the speech event 
category of study groups, it is much higher – 2.07. As can be seen from Example 
(6), 
I mean
used for explanation
 
is close to what Edmondson (1981) calls a let-
me-explain, i.e. one of the five possible types of fumbles (cf. Section 2 above); 
it tends to introduce explanations or additional details. The marker 
I mean
in this 
function usually appears in the middle of a turn (cf. Table 3-2), but it can occur at 
the beginning, as in Example (7). It is used when the current speaker can see that 
the hearer(s) cannot arrive at an
appropriate interpretation and cannot understand 
the message being
conveyed. 
(7) (SGR999SU146.10)