An Investigation of reference in Persian discourse markers

Discourse markers are language elements that linguists do not have a consensus about their nature as well as their role and function. The present study aimed to investigate the function of Persian discourse markers as reference elements, based on Fraser's (1999, 2006) approach. For this purpose, a corpus of two types of political and economic texts was selected. Taking print run and history into consideration, 16 editorials of Kayhan newspaper for political texts and 15 editorials of Donya-e-Eqtesad newspaper for economic texts were analyzed, and the discourse markers were classified into four categories: contrastive, elaborative, inferential and temporal. Data analysis showed that the formula presented by Fraser (1999, 2006), for the sequence of sentences connected by discourse markers, is slightly different in Persian and should be rewritten as S2+DM.S1 /S1.S2 + DM. Furthermore, based on the importance of the information contained in the sentences preceding and succeeding the markers, they can be divided into cataphoric marking (markers placed after the main message), anaphoric marking (markers placed before the main message), and joint marking (markers placed between two main messages). Data analysis indicated that contrastive and elaborative markers are considered as joint marking, and inferential and temporal markers are anaphoric marking in Persian. Based on the research findings, it can be concluded that discourse markers can have a referencing function in information structure.