On a Discourse Marker Combination in Spoken American English: Oh Well as a Case Study

Abstract

This paper investigates a combined discourse marker oh well in spoken American English. The vast majority of research on discourse markers has been conducted on individual items, yet their combinations have received little attention in the literature. In the hope of expanding the knowledge of untapped niche in discourse marker research, the current study aims to examine the functions of a combined discourse marker oh well as a case study. From the analysis, we have found that oh well mostly functions like an amalgamation of two individual discourse markers oh and well, (as a face threat mitigation marker, a discourse initiating marker, a quotative marker, and a topic shift marker), but it sometimes earns extra discourse functions (as a turn exiting marker and a sarcastic speech indexing marker).