No as a discourse marker

The English discourse marker yeah is widely recognized to hold several functions, doing the work not only of agreement and acknowledgment, but also topic management and speaker shift. In contrast, little attention has been paid to no, intuitively its opposite in meaning. Through detailed study of turn-initial tokens of no extracted from corpora of recorded conversations, I propose three senses of no as a discourse marker, on the basis of their pragmatic, semantic, and turn-sequential characteristics. These senses do the work of (i) topic shift, (ii) misunderstanding management, and (iii) turn-taking conflict resolution. While they share key semantic and pragmatic features with other DM and non-DM senses of no, especially negation and indexicality, they are distinguished from each other and other senses by their position within the utterance and larger discourse. I point out the significance of the existence of these senses for examination of complex discourse markers, and for the representation of ongoing discourse.