DMA Discourse/pragmatic markers
Definition
Discourse markers and pragmatic particles: well, okay, actually, anyway, right, etc.
Detection Rules
Default discourse markers rule (based on MFTE). Refines RB.
cql[word={words} & pos!="VB|VBD|VBG|VBN|VBP|VBZ"]
cql[word="right" & pos="UH"]
cql[word="right" & pos="JJ"]
cql[word="well" & pos="UH"]
cql[word="no" & pos="UH"]
cql[word="sure" & pos="JJ|RB"]
cql[word="of"] [word="course"]
combine: p1 | p2 | p3 | p4 | p5 | p6 | p7
Word list (13 items)
mfte
MFTE discourse/pragmatic markers. Two groups: (1) simple word list always tagged DMA, (2) context-sensitive patterns (sure, right, of course, mind you). “now” excluded because MFTE tags it as TIME first. “anyhow” excluded because MFTE tags it as RBother, not DMA. Anchor on “right” (not “all”) and “course” (not “of”) to match MFTE’s anchoring convention.
cql[word={words} & pos!="VB|VBD|VBG|VBN|VBP|VBZ"]
cql[word="right" & pos="UH"]
cql[word="right" & pos="JJ"]
cql[word="well" & pos="UH"]
cql[word="no" & pos="UH"]
cql[word="sure" & pos="JJ|RB"]
cql[word="of"] [word="course"]
combine: p1 | p2 | p3 | p4 | p5 | p6 | p7
Word list (13 items)
pybiber
pybiber replaces all tokens with dep_rel == “punct” with _punct_ in its blob, so any punctuation (including quotation marks) qualifies as the preceding token.
cql[dep="punct"] [word="well|now|anyhow|anyways"]
Normalization
Per words
Examples
Well, that changes everything.
Now, where were we?
Well no they didn’t say actually.
Source: le_foll_2024
Okay I guess we’ll see how things go right?
Source: le_foll_2024
Non-examples
She now understood the full extent of the problem.
now = time adverb, not discourse marker — no longer a false positive (mfte rule excludes “now”)
The well had dried up during the summer.
well = noun (a well) — no longer triggers detector (mfte rule requires UH POS)
Sources
- biber_1988 — Biber, Douglas (1988) : Variation across Speech and Writing
- mfte — Le Foll, Elen & Shakir, Muhammad (2023/2025) : Multi-Feature Tagger of English (MFTE) — Python version
- pybiber — Brown, David West & Reinhart, Alex (2026) : pybiber — Python package for linguistic feature extraction and Multi-Dimensional Analysis
- xiao_2009 — Xiao, Richard (2009) : Multidimensional analysis and the study of world Englishes
- grieve_2023 — Grieve, Jack (2023) : Register variation explains stylometric authorship analysis