The role of learners ’ proficiency in detecting the word “ like ” when functioning as a discourse marker

Introduction During the past decades, discourse analysis (DA) has strongly established a firm foundation for itself in applied linguistics and brought about lots of insights into the nature of real language in various contexts. Discourse analysis is the outgrowth of the interaction among a variety of disciplines including: linguistics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, etc all of which sharing areas of common interest in heeding closely to particular utterances within particular situations, in how natural and authentic language is used by real people in context and finally in responding to many questions germane to language and speakers in the broad context of society and culture. For this reason, “discourse analysis has grown into a wide-ranging and heterogeneous discipline which finds its unity in the description of language above the sentence and an interest in the contexts and cultural influences which affect language in use” (McCarthy, 2005, p. 7). However, discourse analysts differently view the scope of research interest of discourse analysis. Renkema (2004), for example, views DA as the study of “verbal communication”, whilst Schiffrin (1994) regards the subject matter of DA to be “utterance”. Nonetheless, Brown and Yule (1983) adopt a much broader view of DA as a discipline to study “language in use”. Refraining from considering DA as a body of facts or theories, Johnstone (2008, p. xiii) describes her approach to DA as follows: I treat discourse analysis not as a discipline ( or as a subdiscipline of linguistics) but as a systematic rigorous way of suggesting answers to research questions posed in and across disciplines throughout humanities and social sciences and beyond. In other words, I see discourse analysis as a research method that can be (and is being) used by scholars with a variety of academic and non-academic affiliations, coming from a variety of disciplines, to answer a variety of questions. Literature Review Definition of Discourse In order to grasp what really discourse analysis involves, we had better ponder meticulously over what ‘discourse’ is. Johnstone (2008, p. 2) defines discourse as “actual instances of communication in the medium of language”. Given this definition of discourse, she posits that DA refers to the study of language in its everyday sense used by people who, generally speaking, think of language as talk or communication, contrary to the study of language as a system of abstract rules or structures underlying communication. Similarly but more broadly, Bloommaert (2005, p.2) considers discourse as “meaningful symbolic behavior”, hence truly pointing to the fact that not all linguistic communication is just written or spoken. Therefore, discourse analysts have wisely opted for “ discourse analysis” in place of “ language analysis” in order to refrain from merely focusing on language as an abstract system and to make an attempt to shed light on what happens when people in reality use language to exchange information, negotiate meanings, have things done, express emotions, and so on and so forth. Furthermore, with analysis referring, in its literal meaning, to the study of something by examining its parts and their relationship, discourse analysts would be able to underscore the analytical process of DA in a quite explicit way. Thus, it is clearly understood that discourse analysts aim to answer questions of different sorts through analyzing discourse by examining aspects of the structures and functions of real language in use – that is, by breaking down longer stretches of discourse into parts according to criteria of interest and