Associate Professor, PhD
University of Debrecen, Institute of English Studies
Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary

Research area
The main goal of my research is the theoretical and empirical study of a variety of discourse markers with special reference to evidential markers, reformulation markers and general extenders. The aim of my theoretical investigations is to further develop the network model I proposed in my PhD dissertation as well as to reconsider discourse markers’ criterial features. My empirical research focuses on the functional spectrum of discourse markers with a view to finding Hungarian translation equivalents of English DMs and vice versa. I find it especially important to analyse the functional properties of a variety of linguistic items that, to date, have not been studied as discourse markers, i.e. have not been approached from a discourse-pragmatic perspective. By means of the contrastive study of English and Hungarian DMs (partial translation equivalents as well as false friends), my aim is to draw language learners’ attention to the fact that (over)using particular DMs in inappropriate contexts might create unintentional implicatures and result in negative pragmatic transfer, which, in turn, is often (wrongly) associated with the language learners’ personality flaws rather than a lack of language proficiency. My academic interests also include literary pragmatics and the study of cross cultural differences in requests, complimenting as well compliment responses.

Homepage
http://ieas.unideb.hu/furko

E-mail
[email protected]