The multifunctionality of pragmatic markers makes it difficult to describe their meaning and functional potential. For example, we know very little about pragmatic markers and prosody, their sociolinguistic use (how they are related to the speaker's social class, age, or gender) or their distribution across text types (informal conversation, discussion, and broadcast program).

This book surveys pragmatic markers in a corpus of spoken English, focusing on the functions performed by the markers in different types of text. Karen Aijmer explores the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse aspects of the markers. By taking a broader perspective on the markers, classifying them, describing their class-specific properties, and analyzing individual markers, she assesses whether any generalizations can be made about their prosody.