Pragmatic Markers in Political Speeches

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pragmatic markers dates back to Fraser (1990, 1997) who refers to pragmatic markers as “linguistically encoded clues which signal the speaker’s potential communicative intentions” (Fraser, 1997:2). According to Fraser (ibid), pragmatic or mood markers are lexical expressions that constitute an integral part of the sentence meaning but are to be distinguished from the propositional content, i.e. a proposition that involves an individual’s general outlook on the world. Fraser (ibid) identifies four broad types of pragmatic markers, namely basic, commentary, parallel and discourse markers.
Basic markers show the force of the basic message. They include performative expressions, pragmatic idioms, rhetorical questions, such as I hope I apologize, please, kindly.
Commentary markers function as comments on the basic message. They comprise five main types, namely assessment (amazingly, amusingly, inevitably), manner of speaking (bluntly, briefly, fairly) evidential (possibly, surely, ...

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a list of all the words or word-clusters in the text, the KeyWords programme that identifies the most frequent words in one or several texts and the Concord tool that searches a text for a string and presents the results in a list with a certain amount of a co-text (dispersion plots, clusters, collocates). The three computational tools are seen in the shot below:
It is the Concord that has been used for the quantitative study of pragmatic markers. The concordances presented in this work are mostly sentence concordances, which are often easier to read than a crude concordance. To concord the two speeches for the search strings of pragmatic markers the following steps have been ...

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