Investigating discourse markers in the annexes of the International Civil Aviation Organization

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore and investigate the role of discourse markers (DMs) in the annexes of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Discourse markers are cohesive markers that play an important role in connecting paragraphs, sentences, clauses and phrases to both previous and following items and therefore reflect the speaker’s/writer’s intended attitude about a certain issue. Several studies were made concerning the realisation of discourse markers in different genres, but as far as the researcher knows no study was considered in terms of the International Civil Aviation legal documents such as the ICAO annexes. Thus, the focus of this study is on examining discourse markers in the selected data in terms of function and usage by adopting Hyland and Tse’s classification of discourse markers. The results reveal that the textual function of discourse markers dominates the ICAO annexes, whereas the interpersonal functions were not found. Such results proved the significance of the choice and usage of discourse markers in such a specific register as the legal documents of ICAO which designated the impact they have on the structure and organisation of the texts.