Title: Discourse markers as attentional cues at discourse transitions Running head: Discourse transitions

Discourse particles and discourse markers (henceforth DMs) are intriguing objects of study, as they promise the researcher ready access to the very fabric of talk-inprogress. They can occur as lexical equivalents or complements of more elusive gestural or intonational cues that subtly guide and modulate the participants’ understanding, or they can saliently signal relations between utterances or larger discourse units. My own fascination with DMs originated in my interest in developing a model of discourse coherence, which I will sketch in section 3. Accordingly, my approach is a radically functionalist one, as I will explain in the present section and in section 1, where I discuss my definition of coherenceoriented DMs. In section 2, I narrow my focus to one type of discourse-structuring function, that of marking transitions between segments. I illustrate how these transitions can be identified without depending on the presence of a DM. I then report an experiment that tested the hypothesis that DMs at discourse transitions guide the listener’s attention.