The discourse marker now: A relevance-theoretic approach

The English discourse marker now has been characterized as a marker of “temporal relations between utterances in a discourse” ( Schiffrin, 1987) and as a “coherence marker” ( Aijmer, 1988). These and similar formulations are founded on the notion that discourse markers primarily serve functions related to local discourse coherence. In the present paper, drawing on relevance theory ( Sperber and Wilson, 1986, 1995), I argue that it is preferable to formulate the meaning of the marker now without reference to coherence or discourse structure. Two possible relevance-theoretic proposals are considered, one (corresponding roughly to a proposal by Quirk et al., 1985) in which now contributes to the development of a higher-level explicature, and one in which now encodes a procedural constraint on context selection. It is argued that the latter proposal has several advantages over the former and is more comprehensive and unified than existing coherence-based formulations.