Deborah Schiffrin, Discourse markers . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. x + 364.

It is possible to identify three approaches to discourse analysis. One exemplified by Sinclair's group at Birmingham University, and some computationally-based research uses a syntactic model, building a vocabulary of acts and exchanges into larger structures, and then placing this analytical grid over naturally occurring data to see how well it fits. The weakness of this strategy lies in the difficulty of showing that the analysis given of a piece of data is in any sense the required one. This problem besets syntactic analysis too, but is usually much less severe. A second approach looks for organizing principles such as relevance, politeness or co-operation, and attempts to show how these principles shape the form and content of utterances; the work of Grice, Sperber and Wilson, and the sociologist Erving Goffman, falls into this category, and as a rule, invented data are used, often no more than two turns in length (an exception is Levinson, who uses ' real' data from a variety of languages). Both these approaches can be described as 'top down', in that they begin by specifying the abstract categories whose instantiations must be identified. The third, on the other hand, is 'bottom up' analysis, starting with specific linguistic forms, observing their use and distribution, and only then trying to identify the larger or more general structures and principles in terms of which that distribution must be accounted for. Schriffrin's book falls most clearly into the third of these categories, but the value of her analysis is enhanced by the bridge she provides to the second. She describes the use of eleven 'discourse markers' oh, well, and, but, or, so, because, now, then, y'know, and / mean but also sets her description within a theoretical model of discourse itself. In this review I will limit myself to discussion of the overall framework and to two markers: well and y'know. Her account is based on analyses of data collected earlier in a different research context, that of the sociolinguistic interview. Although herself a participant in some of the conversations, Schiffrin is probably right to argue that this does not affect the data in ways that damage her analysis: several grounds are adduced for this claim (41-4). Though by no means restricted to the kind of question-answer sequences that one might expect, the data are somewhat limited in range: they have a common setting and purpose, and the speakers share the same social and ethnic background. The second of these restrictions does not seem harmful; though from a very different background myself, I do not find the usage adopted by these speakers unfamiliar. And though the restriction to a fairly uniform type of interaction may mean that some of Schiffrin's detailed claims would not stand up against other data, her general framework is not genrespecific in the manner of, say, early British work on classroom discourse (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1974). What does make the data used here less than ideal, however, is that it has more than two participants throughout, thus greatly complicating questions such as turn-transition and increasing the number of (possibly conflicting) participants' models of the proceeding conversation. Schiffrin wisely steers clear of this issue, but she could have simply eliminated it by using two-party data only. The essence of Schiffrin's model is that there are several levels of description to be attended to in discourse analysis (24-28), and that a general account of discourse markers needs to refer to all of these (though for a particular marker, reference may need to be made only to two or three). Schiffrin describes these as 'planes' or 'structures': if taken strictly, the use of the latter term would imply a stronger claim than she succeeds in justifying, but it is not unusual in discourse analysis for' structure' to be used in a less tightly-defined way than in syntax or formal semantics (cf., for example, Grosz & Sidner, 1986). What such a theory provides is not so much a facility for making predictions which can then be tested, but a framework in which observations can be made and classified, allowing features such as discourse markers to be accounted for under several headings at once. It is because of this that the book falls into the second category described above, and not the first. Schiffrin's five organizational headings are: Exchange Structure and Action Structure (both pragmatic in nature), Ideational Structure (semantic or propositional), Participation Framework (speaker/hearer roles and identities),