Discourse markers in relation tonon-verbal behavior : How do speech and body language correlate?

The research proposed in this paper focuses on pragmatic interlinks between discourse markers and non-verbal behavior. Although non-verbal behavior is recognized to add non-redundant information and social interaction is not merely recognized as the transmission of words and sentences, the evidence regarding grammatical/linguistic interlinks between verbal and non-verbal concepts are vague and limited to restricted domains. This is even more evident when non-verbal behavior acts in the foreground but contributes to the structure and organization of the discourse. This research focuses on investigating the multimodal nature of discourse markers by observing their linguistic and paralinguistic properties in informal discourse. We perform a quantitative analysis with case studies for representative cases. The results show that discourse markers and background non-verbal behavior tend to follow a similar functionality in interaction. Therefore, by examining them together, one gains more insight into their true intent despite the high multifunctionality of both non-verbal behavior and DMs.