Hát szóval ez egy ilyen érdekes terület : A magyarországi diskurzusjelölő-kutatás a kezdetektől napjainkig = Well, so, this is such an interesting field. The history of discourse marker research in Hungary

Schirm, Anita (2026) Hát szóval ez egy ilyen érdekes terület : A magyarországi diskurzusjelölő-kutatás a kezdetektől napjainkig = Well, so, this is such an interesting field. The history of discourse marker research in Hungary. ALKALMAZOTT NYELVTUDOMÁNY, 2026 (KSZ). pp. 93-107. ISSN 1587-1061

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Abstract

The study reviews the main stages, research topics, and most important results of Hungarian discourse marker research over the past 35 years, from its beginnings to the present. The beginnings date back to the late 1980s, and the field has developed very dynamically since then, as shown by the growing number of publications. Discourse marker research in Hungary can be divided into four major periods, which do not differ sharply in terms of their topics or temporal boundaries, and which overlap. The so-called preparatory phase lasted until the end of the 1980s, when the term discourse marker was not yet used and the word class was not systematically examined, but grammatical research on the elements belonging to them (e.g. Deme, 1984; Klemm, 1929; Simonyi, 1881, 1882) had already made observations relevant to discourse analysis, for example, it was established that these elements can also express the speaker's attitude to what is being said. At this stage, analyses mostly relied on written sources, as the role of spoken language was still marginal. The actual research on discourse markers began in the late 1980s (Fábricz, 1986; Kiefer, 1988; Keszler, 1998; Németh T., 1998). Thanks to the pragmatic turn, researchers began to address the problems of defining word classes and their individual elements. The initial studies were still mainly theoretical, and issues such as the separability of semantics and pragmatics, the difference between cohesion and coherence, and the relationship between conjunctions and discourse markers were also discussed. The terminology was not yet uniform at that time, and elements belonging to the word class were referred to in various ways (e.g., pragmatic conjunctions, particles). In the 2010s, new directions appeared in discourse marker research. On the one hand, the studies became empirical and corpus-based. The functional spectrum and synchronic status of more and more elements (e.g., hát ‘well’, szóval ‘so’, vajon ‘whether’, ugye (= tag question) ’isn’t it’, mondjuk ’say’) were mapped, and the aspect of multimodality was also included in the analyses (cf. Abuczki, 2014). On the other hand, in addition to synchronic studies, historical analyses also began, and the combined treatment of contemporary and historical data became common. Thirdly, the patterns and roles of discourse markers across different text types were increasingly researched. One of the defining directions of research became the exploration of conversation-organizing and coherence-creating functions, as well as speaker attitudes, both text-type-dependent and -independent. By mapping the functional spectrum of elements, the refutation of linguistic superstitions related to discourse markers and the dissemination of scientific knowledge also became emphasized. Nowadays, in the fourth era, applied linguistic aspects are in the foreground, and research is now interdisciplinary: it touches, among others, on mother tongue pedagogy (Hollóy, 2025), translation studies (Dróth, 2021), forensic text linguistics (Markó et al., 2024), and artificial intelligence-based automatic annotation (Furkó & Tóth, 2023; Marcsenkoné Kondacs, 2024).

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