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In previous studies there is a strong preference for say as a main verb of quotation in introducing reported speech or dialogue. The present study aims to characterize the use of say as a discourse marker in both written and spoken discourse. Using the data from the British National Corpus (BNC), this paper provides a corpus-based analysis of discourse marker say in terms of syntactic and functional distributions. Along with evidence from the data, say is found to display syntactic freedom, occurring in the sentence-initial, the sentence-medial, and the sentence-final position. An examination on the functional distributions of say shows that it performs a variety of functions on three levels of discourse, i.e., the textual level, the interactional level, and the attitudinal level. Quantification reveals that say is most fiequently used as an attitudinal marker in discourse but there is a considerable variation in its use in spoken and written discourse.

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