Discourse markers as contextual divergence

Abstract This study explores two discourse markers, well in English and isscanha in Korean, in the naturally occurring speech of English-speaking and Korean-speaking children. This corpus-driven analysis proposes a unified core meaning of the two markers as signaling contextual divergence from which varied meanings are derived according to the interactional environments. The interactional meanings of the two discourse markers are remarkably similar: they foreshadow topic shift, mark contrast in various ways, and insist on opinions. Children evidently employ the two markers for achieving discourse coherence, signaling interactional divergence, and enhancing their epistemic stance. The plufunctionality of the focal discourse markers indicates that children are developing interactional competence during the course of spoken language development. The corpus-driven analysis elucidates similarities in the meanings of the markers between the two linguistic groups, and thus adds evidence of interactional resources to the body of literature on spoken language acquisition.