Oh what a difference an ó makes: a contrastive study of English oh and Hungarian ó.

In the present paper I hope to take the first step towards an understanding of the discourse pragmatics of English oh and Hungarian ó. After a discussion of the difficulties inherent in conducting research into pragmatic markers (henceforth PMs), I will make an attempt to give a contrastive (if somewhat sketchy) account of the multifarious uses of the two markers on the basis of previous accounts as well as my own empirical research. After mapping the two PMs' respective functional spectra and discussing some of the similarities and differences in terms of their uses I will also mention possible descriptive, theoretical and teaching implications such a contrastive study can offer.