What Does a Discourse Particle Do?

The particles are really tough to explain. Older free grammars may be very bad about explaining them because they don't, it's very hard to tease out their meaning. The idea of thinking about discourse at a much higher level is new to some of these older languages that are particle rich. A discourse particle can let you know how the speaker thinks about things. In particular, is this information expected or unexpected? Okay. So we have our somewhat sarcastic discourse particle or discourse phrase.