In my discussion so far, I have focused on expressions (oh, well) whose linguistic contribution to their discourse function as markers is minimal. I now shift to a very different set of markers: and, but, and or. Because these elements have a role in the grammatical system of English, their analysis as markers has to proceed somewhat differently: in addition to characterizing the discourse slot(s) in which they occur, we need to consider the possibility that grammatical properties of the items themselves contribute to their discourse function. Thus, after my description of their discourse function, I will consider possible relationships between these functions and the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of conjunctions. We will also see that these markers form a set of discourse connectives, and that they have both ideational and pragmatic functions in talk (i.e. in exchange and action structures, and in participation frameworks).

And

And has two roles in talk: it coordinates idea units and it continues a speaker's action. Although and has these roles simultaneously, it will be easier to demonstrate them by describing them separately.

Building a text

I begin by observing that and is the most frequently used mode of connection at a local level of idea structure: 1002 clause-sized idea units in my corpus were prefaced by and, compared to 440 by but, 206 by so, and only 53 by or.