Discourse Markers as Means of Compositional Integrity in English Last Wills and Testaments
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Date
2021-05-04
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Abstract
A Last Will and Testament as a legal document of Inheritance Law is of particular importance
for the life of modern societies of all developed and underdeveloped countries. The research
focuses on the complex analysis of the study of English Last Will and Testament as a social
and communicative phenomenon which is a repetitive speech act that generates a typical
linguistic layout of the content to meet the communicative needs of a testator/testatrix on the
issue of the inheritance of property and money after their death in the situation of bequest. The
corpus of the research contains 400 wills written in England between 1837 and 2015 (525 023
characters). Attention is paid to discourse markers which provide structural integrity of the
text in wills. The main aim of this article is to conduct the analysis of discourse markers found
in English Last Wills and Testaments. The classification of discourse markers by B. Fraser has
been used in the study. A structural method has been applied to single out groups of discourse
markers. Discourse markers of sequence as a subtype of discourse activity markers, parallel
discourse markers, contrastive discourse markers, elaborative discourse markers and
inferential discourse markers as subtypes of message relationship markers are common in the
texts of Last Wills and Testaments. These markers complement the content of a previous
statement, combine parts of a sentence, introduce new information, contrast events, actions
and even participants. The usage of discourse markers facilities communication and ensures
the compositional integrity of the text.
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Keywords
Last Will and Testament, discourse marker, compositional integrity, structural method
Citation
Kulyna O. Discourse Markers as Means of Compositional Integrity in English Last Wills and Testaments / Olha Kulyna // Computational linguistics and intelligent systems, 22-23 April 2021, Kharkiv. — Lviv ; Kharkiv, 2021. — Vol Vol. II : Proceedings of the 5th International conference, COLINS 2021, Workshop, Kharkiv, Ukraine, April 22-23. — P. 50–57.