From a Logical Connective to a Discourse Marker: The Functions of “So” Dependent on its Location

Abstract

Traditional studies have been referring to Halliday’s meta-function of language to classify the uses of “so” as a discourse marker. However, there are some overlaps in the theories that were accepted earlier. Thus, this study first seeks to explore the discourse roles of “so” in terms of where it appears (utterance-initial, -middle, and -final) in dialogues and monologues of informal English language based on the TV Corpus and AntConc tool. Second, this paper tries to explain the extended use and internal functional mapping of “so” from a logical connective to a discourse marker in spoken English by building a connection between the two uses and providing an account for its functional borrowing. The ultimate goal is to render a new perspective of presenting both the logical and the discourse functions of “so” related to the syntactical structure and pragmatic context it is in.