0 a word or phrase that is used for organizing discourse (= spoken or written communication ), for example well, so, or in fact:
His style is full of chatty discourse markers (for a start, touch wood, in any event, possibly).
Utterances such as venga ("come"), mira ("look") and oye ("listen") are typically used as discourse markers in Spanish.
Discourse markers such as "well", "you know", and "like" are not usually explicitly taught to language learners.
In her corpus-based research on the phrase "I think" in American English, she finds that it often serves strictly as a discourse marker, with no real semantic content.
