Discourse Markers in National and European Parliamentary Debates
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2026.i27.1719Keywords:
Discourse markers, Parliamentary debates, Corpus analysis, Spoken language, Conversation analysisAbstract
Parliamentary discourse follows both cooperative and conflict-driven communication strategies. This paper explores whether and how such intents are pursued by discourse markers (DMs) in parliamentary speeches. To this aim, four types of DMs in national and European parliamentary debates are focused on: “and so on and so forth” and “and things like that” (vague category markers); “as I was saying” and “in other words” (reformulation devices); “(do) you know what?” and “you know what I mean” (sharedness markers), and “after all” and “at the end of the day” (summarising tokens). The ParlaMint and Europarl spoken corpora available in the Sketch Engine platform are consulted. This paper not only investigates DMs’ usages in context, frequencies and pragmatics, but it also examines possible Italian equivalents and English synonyms, thus highlighting differences and/or similarities. The findings indicate discrepancies between national and European DMs. Particularly, there is variability in the types, usages, and occurrence rates of DMs across the corpora and in the two languages. At times, the European corpora produce greater frequencies of some DMs, whereas national parliamentary debates show notable percentage values in others, although to a lesser degree. Moreover, literature-sourced Italian equivalents of English DMs are not always found in the corpora, which generate other or fewer multi-words. The study also finds that the Europarl dataset yields varied English synonymous DMs.
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