1. Introduction

Discourse markers (DMs henceforth) have been a popular topic in discourse and pragmatics research over the last couple of decades (Schiffrin 1987; Miracle 1991; Fraser 1999; Rǎn 2000; Feng 2008; Yīn 2012, to name but a few publications on the topic). A recent query in the Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA; October 5, 2015) database shows that DMs have been studied in Spanish, Engl…