Discourse Markers as Means of Compositional Integrity in English Last Wills and Testaments

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.