Now as a Discourse Marker in Spoken English (Paperback)

Now is a very frequent word in English. Anyone with at least some command of English will tell you what it "means". But really? This book wants to illustrate that there is more to the meaning than just dictionary entries. Discourse markers (DMs) have recently become a very popular topic in pragmatics. However, now has been only rarely mentioned. Even though it cannot compete with some other DMs in frequency, its functions in discourse by far surpass the role of a temporal adverb.