Discourse markers in a comic fragmentary dialogue

Discourse markers contribute to determining and interpreting the fragmentary text whilst discerning character attitudes and relationships. This paper analyses the forms and functions of discourse markers in five dialogue fragments of Sicilian and Old Attic comedy of the 5th c. BCE: Epicharmus fr. 147 PCG and four fragments from Aristophanes’ comedy Daital¯es, frs. 205, 206, 232, 233 PCG. I argue that the cooccurrence of specific characteristics of speech-like text-type, such as structures of spoken face-to-face interaction, lexical markers of communicative tension, lexical repeats, grammatical indicators, pragmatic and sociolinguistic markers, helps shape the dialogical type of discourse and increase the cohesion of interaction on morphological, syntactical and semantical levels. Further, elliptical sentences, speaker interruption, and answering questions with a question all contribute to the tension and suspence of the dialogue.