Abstract
This study aims to contribute both to the cross-linguistic research of pragmatic markers and their variation within one language. Following a study on the causal connective protože ('because') in spoken and written Czech (Čermáková et al. 2017), which showed that protože has pragmatic meaning and functions as a discourse/pragmatic marker only in spoken language where its core causative meaning disappears or is very weak, we aim to examine several other expressions in Czech: ale ('but'), myslím ('I think'), jasně ('surely') - following Schiffrin's (1988) distinction between 'particles' and 'connectives' we include both types.
These lexemes are cross-linguistically considered to belong to the heterogeneous group of discourse/pragmatic markers and have been studied in other languages. From the point of view of traditional linguistic categorization, these items are sufficiently heterogeneous to allow a brief view into the nature of pragmatic markers in Czech, where these have not been extensively studied so far.