A Contrastive Study of English 'of course' and Hungarian 'persze'

Pragmatic Markers (henceforth PMs) are intriguing objects of study for several reasons: they promise the researcher insight into the mechanics of talk-in-progress, the differences between planned and unplanned discourse and the process of grammaticalization, they raise questions concerning gender-preferential differentiation, the pragmatics/semantics boundary, the relationship between cohesion and coherence and a variety of other phenomena that have long fascinated and puzzled linguists. Over the past few decades research on Pragmatic Markers has been rapidly expanding and the theoretical appeal is amply demonstrated by the number of frameworks that have been applied to the study of these items (Relevance Theory, Rhetorical Structure Theory, Construction Grammar, coherence-based studies, Interactional Sociolinguistics, Conversation Analysis, to mention but a few). At the same time, empirical research has yielded detailed analyses of a variety of items in a wide range of languages. This study aims to contribute to the empirical research of PMs.