Is it grammaticalization, though?: On the development of 'though' as a discourse marker

The paper reopens the question of 'though' as a discourse marker with new data and an attempt at refining the points along the pathway. A total of 217 conversations between friends and family taken from the CallFriend and CallHome English Corpora at talkbank.org was searched for instances of 'though', which were then grouped into four categories based on their function: concessive, topic close and concessive, topic shift and concessive, and purely pragmatic. The analysis is both qualitative and quantitative, and the criterion of the position of 'though' is also considered.