Pragmatic Markers in British English

Abstract

Fundamental to oral fluency, pragmatic markers facilitate the flow of spontaneous, interactional and social conversation. Variously termed 'hedges', 'fumbles' and 'conversational greasers' in earlier academic studies, this book explores the meaning, function and role of 'well', 'I mean', 'just', 'sort of', 'like' and 'you know' in British English. Adopting a sociolinguistic and historical perspective, Beeching investigates how these six commonly occurring pragmatic markers are used and the ways in which their current meanings and functions have evolved. Informed by empirical data from a wide range of contemporary and historical sources, including a small corpus of spoken English collected in 2011–14, the British National Corpus and the Old Bailey Corpus, Pragmatic Markers in British English contributes to debates about language variation and change, incrementation in adolescence and grammaticalisation and pragmaticalisation. It will be fascinating reading for researchers and students in linguistics and English, as well as non-specialists intrigued by this speech phenomenon.

The Multilingual Pragmatics of New Englishes: An Analysis of Question Tags in Nigerian English

“…Besides speech acts, the pragmatic phenomena most often studied in this field of research are discourse-pragmaticfeatures. However, there has been a strong focus on English varieties spoken as a native language, such as British English (e.g., Pichler, 2013;Beeching, 2016). In addition, corpus analyses of discourse-pragmatic-features have mainly focused on face-toface conversation, while other text types have been neglected.…”

“…In addition, corpus analyses of discourse-pragmatic-features have mainly focused on face-toface conversation, while other text types have been neglected. Moreover, there are hardly any studies on discourse-pragmaticfeatures that have utilized survey data; an exception is Beeching (2016). Survey data in general is rare for studying pragmatic phenomena in New Englishes; exceptions include Schröder and Schneider (2018) and Anchimbe (2018).…”

Interaction management in academic speaking

“…The availability of spoken corpora, especially those containing unscripted, informal conversation, has revolutionised the study of conversational interaction. Corpusinformed applied linguistic and pedagogically-oriented reference works and individual studies such as Stenström (1994) Carter and McCarthy (1995), Carter and McCarthy (1997), McCarthy (1998), Biber et al (1999), Carter and McCarthy (2006), Rühlemann (2007), Beeching (2016) have described the language of social interaction, building on the knowledge base established by earlier conversational analysts (Sacks et al 1974, Goffman 1981, Atkinson and Heritage 1984, Hutchby & Wooffitt 1988 and augmenting their work by exploiting the power of large-scale data, where conversation analysts tended to work with individual transcripts. What has also been underlined by the evidence of corpus studies is the highly context-sensitive nature of spoken interaction.…”

Question tags across New Englishes

“…The form‐function mismatch of most pragmatic phenomena, including discourse markers, requires close analysis of every token and complicates the analysis of all potential realizations of a variable. Hence, most studies on discourse markers have focused on individual forms, such as like (Beeching, 2016). The need for a detailed analysis of each token requires a close reading of the communicative context.…”

“…However, discourse markers are integral for analyses of text type variation across Englishes: they are frequently used in spoken discourse and their use depends on the communicative setting (Pichler, 2013; Schiffrin, 1987). Additionally, text type variation has been underrepresented in studies of discourse markers (Barron, 2015, p. 224), which mostly rely on face‐to‐face conversations exclusively (Columbus, 2009, 2010; Beeching, 2016; Kimps, 2018).…”