User:Alhassan6/sandbox

= Discourse marker = - Every thing in the article seems to be relevant.

- The article seems to depend on one researcher McCormick when defining DMs.

- There were other approaches to DMs that have not been discussed in this article.

- All links seem to work with no problems.

- The article seems to b every short; a lot of things need to be added such as:

(1) Approaches to the study of discourse markers.

(2) The different functions of every single discourse marker.

(3) What is considered be a discourse marker and what is not?

(4) The main classes of discourse markers.

(5) The development of discourse markers.

- Wikipedia discusses an article in a very broad way. Other approaches to DMs are not discussed in details. It only meant to be very general so that any person who is not specialized in linguistics can understand the basic idea of DMs pretty easily.

Evaluation of Discourse Marker (Usage section)
The article that will be used provides an overview of how conjunctions can be used as DMs. Other similar studies (e.g., Alsharif, 2017; Alazzawie, 2014) that also investigated the functions and uses of conjunctions as DMs in Arabic can be cited as well.

As discussed in class, more examples of Arabic conjunctions that function as DMs will be added. Also, these examples will be followed by a brief explanation of how these conjunctions can be used to bind two sentences. For example, the coordinating conjunction lakin ‘but’ in Arabic can be used to tell the reader/listener that the following segment will revise or limit the preceding segment.

Coordinating Conjunctions as Discourse markers (DMs)
According to Siepmann (2005), coordinating conjunctions are considered discourse markers (DMs) since they tell the reader/listener how to relate the two segments of discourse (sentences or clauses). Languages do not seem to have one-to-one correspondence in terms of conjunctions, especially when the two languages are not genetically related such as English and Arabic (Emara, 2014). Therefore, the functions of these conjunctions differ cross-linguistically; the same DM in two languages might be used for distinct functions based on the context in which that conjunction was used. For example, the coordinating conjunction wa ‘and’ in Arabic have a number of functions that do not correspond to its counterpart in English. The coordinating conjunction wa ‘and’ in Arabic might be used for a number of functions such as (i) an introductory to start a new topic, (ii) as an adverbial meaning while, or (iii) as an adjunct marker to modify an event (Alazzawie, 2014). There are other coordinating conjunctions in Arabic such as θumma 'then' that is used to link two sentences or clauses with no specific interval of time, which is similar two to that of English. However, this DM (θumma) has other functions that does not correspond to that of English as Tahaineh and Tafish (2011) pointed out. i.e., it has other functions such as adversative function and consequential function. In the first case (adversative case), the DM θumma is used to conjoin two clauses or sentences in which the second one is an unexpected result of the first. In the second case (consequential case), the DM θumma is used to link two sentences or clauses in which the second one happened as a consequence of the first one. In both cases, literal translation of the DM from Arabic into English would sound awkward to a native speaker of English, so such functions should be translated based on their pragmatic functions in a sentence (Tahaineh and Tafish, 2011).