Analysis of the use of discourse markers in written arguments by college students

This research deals with the writing problems currently faced by higher education students starting from the analysis of the use they make in their texts of the discourse markers. The selected corpus is a set of 80 essays written by students of the Catholic Pontifical University (Pontificia Universidad Católica) of Chile. This article entails a descriptive and correlational study that can be considered exploratory. The author analyzes the structure of the argument texts in which those markers are operating and describes and illustrates the different functions carried out by the markers within the essays, proving their prevailing role for the processing of inferences. She also verifies the correspondence between the markers' appropriateness and the logical progression of the essays in which they are working. This allows to demonstrate that the use of those particles in arguments is essential in order to produce coherent texts.