Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

 
an
 
insert which
 
comments on a thought rather than the delivery of wording (cf. the first three 
syntactic types of CCs defined as parenthetical content disjuncts in Quirk et al. 
1985: 1112-1118) and included among CCs because it seems to “share enough 
features with 
I think
, 
you know
and 
you see
to qualify with them as a type (1) 
CC” (Stenström 1995: 291). Biber et al. (1999: 197) provide an example which 
includes several tokens of 
I mean
: 
I mean
 it’s, it’s general I suppose 
I mean
 if it 
would be better to switch it on and off which you can do and er, you know, 
I mean 
we can’t sit here continually talking
. It should be noted that the authors view 
CCs as
closely related to DMs, which “tend to occur at the beginning of a turn 
or utterance, and to combine two roles: (a) to signal a transition in the evolving 
process of the conversation, and (b) to signal an interactive relationship between 
speaker, hearer, and message” (ibid.: 1086). However, as will be illustrated 
below, it cannot be claimed that
 I mean
tends to occur at the beginning of a 
turn or utterance, although a few tokens in this position have been found in my 
material (cf. Table 3-2 in Section 4 below).
Crystal and Davy (1969: 48) consider 
I mean 
and
 you know 
as parenthetic 
clauses “which may be embedded in the main clause, or may occur in sequence 
with it” (cf. ‘parentheticals’ in Huddleston and Pullum 2002).
When exploring the most important characteristics of conversational English 
and the ways in which sentences can be connected, Crystal (1975) distinguishes 
three main functions of connectives, two of which include 
I mean
: firstly, 
connectives that may be interpreted as diminishing or retracting the whole or 

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