Multiword Expressions as Discourse Markers in Hebrew and Lithuanian

Abstract

Multiword expressions are of key importance in language generation and processing and could also operate as discourse markers. We combined the alignment model of the phrase-based statistical machine translation and manual treatment of the data in order to examine English multiword discourse markers and their equivalents in Lithuanian and Hebrew, by researching their changes in translation. We focused on the two most frequent: ‘I think’ and ‘you know’ aiming to research if they demonstrate their functional stability as discourse markers in translation and what changes they undergo in Lithuanian and Hebrew translation.