Theories of Readability Review of Related Theories
hesitation markersfillers, prompters, repair markers, attitude markers, and hedging devices.
Winda Adeputri Djohar in her undergraduate thesis, “The Equivalence and The Acceptability of The Translation of Discourse Markers in John Boyne‟s The
Boy in the Striped Pyjamas ”, explains some of the functions as follow:
1. Confirmation-seekers
: markers that are used by the speaker to confirm what he has said, such as
isn’t it?, right?, okay?, etc. 2.
Intimacy-signal : words that are used by the speakers and
other participants as to show the closeness among them, such as names, babe, love, daddy, etc.
3. Topic-switchers : discourse markers which are used by the speaker
to change or switch the topic from the previous topic into another topic.
4. Discourse connector : connecting the prior discourse and the current
utterance, such as so and therefore. Jucker, Andreas H. and Yael Ziv, 2004:2
Other explanations from some resources explain the other funtions as follow:
1. Attitude marker : markers that are used to “make a comment on the
message conveyed
by a
speaker or
writer. ”
legacy.australianetwork.com 2.
Repair marker : markers that are used “when speakers need to repair, correct or edit their utterance in the process of having a
conversation. ” http:www.culingtec.uni-leipzig.de Some examples
of this marker such as like, you know, I mean. Jucker, Andreas H. and Yael Ziv, 2004:7
3. Hesitation markersfillers : markers that are used to mark a hesitation
on the part of the speaker. “It indicates that the speaker are formulating
what they want to say. “ Davis, Boyd H. and Margaret Maclagan,
2010:189 Lan-Fen Huang, in her thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 2011 entitled “Discourse Markers In Spoken English: A Corpus Study of Native Speakers and Chinese Non-Native
Speakers”, she states there are some characteristics of DMs proposed by Schourup 1999 and Fung and Carter 2007. One of the characteristics is the flexibility of
position. The flexibility of position means DMs can appear at any point such as in
the initial position, in the middle, or even in the final position of a sentence. Fung and Carter, 2007 Examples:
“I eat a lot.” “I eat a lot, you know.”
“You know, I eat a lot.”
Erman in Jucker 1998:2 states “‟pragmatic expression‟ tends to be used
for markers that consist of more than one word such as you know, you see, I mean
.” Some words are found as discoure markers such as stated in Jucker‟s Discourse Marker: Introduction” Discourse Markers: Description and Theory: