Discourse markers (DMs) are pragmatic devices, which operate beyond the traditional word or phrase classification and have little to no effect on the propositional meaning. They have significant functions with regard to organising ongoing discourse by linking discourse segments, illustrating the current discourse structure to the interlocutors. Recent studies have discovered that DMs are truly multifunctional and thus play communicative roles at different dimensions simultaneously, ranging from managing discourse by denoting the speaker’s attitude, monitoring turn-taking activities to prompting the shared-knowledge between interlocutors. Nevertheless, few attentions have been paid on the fact that human communication is multimodal, wherein discourse includes both spoken language and gestures. Most DM studies predominantly investigate the use of DMs in text-based frameworks and therefore do not do justice to the non-linguistic DM functions, which are not easily amenable to text descriptions. The goal of this paper is to draw attention to this gap from the pragmatic perspective on DMs, demonstrating the importance of multimodal approaches to the study area.

中文翻译：

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论语篇标记的多模态方法的重要性

话语标记（DM）是实用的工具，其作用超出了传统的单词或短语分类，对命题含义几乎没有影响。它们通过链接各个语段来组织正在进行的语篇，具有重要功能，向对话者说明了当前的语篇结构。最近的研究发现，DM确实是多功能的，因此可以同时在不同维度上发挥沟通作用，范围从通过演讲者的态度来管理话语，监控转弯活动到促进对话者之间的共享知识。然而，很少有人关注人类交流是多模式的这一事实，其中话语包括口头语言和手势。大多数DM研究主要调查在基于文本的框架中对DM的使用，因此不符合非语言DM功能，因为非语言DM功能不容易接受文本描述。本文的目的是从对DM的务实的角度引起人们对这一差距的关注，从而证明多峰方法在研究领域中的重要性。