ABSTRACT
The following extract is taken from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (MWW):
(11.1) Evans: But that is not the question: the question is concerning your marriage.
Shallow: Ay, there’s the point, sir. Evans: Marry, is it; the very point of it – to Mistress Anne
Page. Slender: Why, if it be so, I will marry her upon any reasonable
demands. (MWW I.i.220-226)2
Words such as marry and why at the beginning of the third and fourth utterance, in the way they are used here, are discourse markers. It is difficult to say what exactly they mean, and it is difficult to translate them into other languages. They are part of the interaction between the two speakers. In some sense they convey the speaker’s attitude towards what is going on at the moment. Marry is a mild oath; it emphasises the utterance in which it occurs. And why conveys the speaker’s surprise at the previous utterance.
