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Abstract Discourse Markers (DMs) have been a topic of research for 30 years under many different names. The present paper presents an account of one view of DMs with the aim of providing researchers in the field with a coherent definition of DMs and a presentation of the syntactic and semantic properties of this functional category that will enable them to compare their work on DMs with other researchers. In addition, an analysis of the uses of the DM but supports the claim that there is one core meaning relationship, contrast, with the interpretation of the more than 10 different uses of but being signalled by context and pragmatic elaboration.
Bruce Fraser (Thu,) studied this question.