The use of Linear Unit Grammar (LUG) in the investigation of discourse markers in spoken English

Linear Unit Grammar (LUG) (Sinclair & Mauranen, 2006) is claimed to accommodate both written and spoken English. However, there have not so far been any studies which use the LUG analysis. This paper is probably one of the first studies using LUG since its publication. It demonstrates the use of LUG in the investigation of discourse markers, which are distinctive in spoken English. One of the difficulties in investigating discourse markers is their ambiguous syntactical roles. Another is the lack of a generally-accepted system to describe their positions in utterances. This paper is motivated by the need for describing the positions of discourse markers and for distinguishing the non-discourse use of the words and phrases (i.e. in different part of speech and in subject + verb structure) from discourse use (i.e. discourse markers). The LUG analysis is first introduced and the two difficulties in the analysis of discourse markers and the uses of LUG are discussed, followed by the assessment of LUG, pointing to its usefulness and weaknesses. This paper concludes with some possible applications of LUG.