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.