DISCOURSE MARKERS AND GLOBAL COHERENCE IN CONVERSATION

How do conversationalists manage to understand each other? Close analy sis of British and American conversations (from the London-Lund-Corpus and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English) reveals clea rly that we use structural items that reach beyond the scope of discou rse markers as were analyzed by Schiffrin (1987). I call these global discourse markers because of their global orientation within the disco urse. It seems that global discourse markers mostly occur at the begin ning and at the end of digressions, as well as with topic shifts and t opic drifts. In this paper, two of these items, however and still, are described in their structuring functions within ongoing discourse, an d examples from the corpora are given, indicating that differences in global coherence strategies exist between the two large varieties of E nglish.