Guide:Discourse Particles

Discourse particles is probably the least used in conlangs and least understood, yet we humans use them perfectly without issue in our native tounges, but at the sametime it is the one method we use easily to identify foreign people.

What are discourse particles? Discourse particles are small words or phrases that adds no information to the sentence itself, the truth value of the statement remains intact and the statement itself. For example the two sentences "He was at the store" and "Well, he was at the store" contains the same amount of information, but the "well" differs them, "well" does not add any content information, he was still at the store, whom ever he is. So what is the real differens? The differens is that "well" here convey disource information, in english it typicly attempts to convey information about the listener might not like the information that is being presented and prepares them for information that they will not like.

Discourse particles do not need to be even "words" persay, there are plenty of them that are not considered words and just "noises" we make, "umm" is a classical exemple, it means along the lines of that the speaker is trying to think of something and do not want their turn of speaking being interupted, so in an essence "umm" is saying "I am still talking, give me a moment to think about what I am trying to say and do not take my turn to speak from me".

"ah ha" or "mmhmm" can be seen as saying "I hear what you're saying and might agree, please continue as I have been listening so far"