MOST conversations in speaking or writing contexts are usually prefaced with discourse markers. Why is this fitting, and why are discourse markers inevitable in communication? This article discusses ...

Um, don’t you get, you know, annoyed by verbal clutter? Nothing sinks a public speaker quicker than an overdose of ums and uhs. Professional yakkers are expected to purge their speech of such lexical ...

New research suggests that people who use filler speech and discourse markers are more thoughtful than those that don't. Like, y'know? There are plenty of habits that we know we have that annoy other ...

WELCOME to the last part of the series on discourse markers. This week, we will consider discourse markers – words that show the connection between what a speaker is saying and what has already been ...