What Are Discourse Particles?

Linguist: " discourse particles are the sorts of words that when you ask people what they mean, native speakers especially will say it doesn't mean anything at all" Linguists must be completely exasperating for field linguists. But two of the really strong characteristics of discourse particles are they do not affect the truth conditions of the statement. And then the last big thing is discourse particles are related to the active speech context, not the situation being described.