Discourse markers in writing on Facebook by early balanced English/Italian bilinguals

Abstract

This article presents a case study concerning the use of discourse markers (further - 'DMs') in the writing of status updates on Facebook by a group of early balanced English/Italian bilinguals (further - 'participants'), who were born in Australia in the families of Italian immigrants. The corpus of the participants' status updates on Facebook was analysed by means of the WordSmith software for linguistic analysis (Scott 2008) in order to identify the frequency of DMs used by the participants in the English and Italian languages, respectively. The results of the data analysis indicated that the participants employed, predominantly, English DMs (for instance, and, but, though, and yep), while the repertoire of the Italian DMs was limited to diciamo (English equivalents, e.g. let's say, I mean), ecco (English equivalents, e.g. here, well), and ma (English equivalents, e.g., but, yet). These findings are further presented and discussed in the article.