The Boston Globe

Discourse markers are, like, important

Um, don’t you get, you know, annoyed by verbal clutter? Nothing sinks a public speaker quicker than an overdose of ums and uhs. Professional yakkers are expected to purge their speech of such lexical ...
manilatimes

Using discourse markers for contextualizing ideas

No doubt that most of you who read my English-usage columns and Forum website are now thoroughly familiar with the English content words and function words, which have been among the most recurrent ...
UPI

Study: People who use 'like' as a linguistic crutch tend to be more thoughtful

AUSTIN, Texas, June 10 (UPI) --A new study published by the Journal of Language and Social Psychology says that individuals who use filler words such as "you know," "um" and "like" are more likely to ...
entertainment.ie

People who say 'like' a lot are more thoughtful and conscientious than the rest of us

New research suggests that people who use filler speech and discourse markers are more thoughtful than those that don't. Like, y'know? There are plenty of habits that we know we have that annoy other ...
KUOW

So, you know, young women are totally at the forefront of creativity in language

So, like, does it bother you the way some people speak? Some of us use what are called "discourse markers" in conversation. A linguistics professor at Seattle Pacific University says discourse markers ...