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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.
Pragmatics of society takes a socio-cultural perspective on pragmatics and gives a broad view of how social and cultural factors influence language use. The volume covers a wide range of topics within the field of sociopragmatics. This subfield of pragmatics encompasses sociolinguistic studies that focus on how pragmatic and discourse features vary according to macro-sociological variables such as age, gender, class and region (variational pragmatics), and discourse/conversation analytical studies investigating variation according to the activity engaged in by the participants and the identities displayed as relevant in interaction. The volume also covers studies in linguistic pragmatics with a more general socio-cultural focus, including global and intercultural communication, politeness, critical discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Each article presents the state-of-the-art of the topic at hand, as well as new research.
The study of informal involvement with additional languages has recently emerged as a dynamic research field in SLA. With the rapid development and spread of internet-based technologies, contact with foreign languages outside the classroom has become commonplace. While this can take multiple forms, online contents are a major driving force because they present learners with unprecedented opportunities for exposure to and use of target languages regardless of their physical location. Research from diverse geographical, educational and socio-economic contexts bring a rich variety of perspectives to this book. It explores these phenomena via a range of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches, focusing particularly on individual differences and language development. The volume proposes that teachers in formal learning settings should seek to support and facilitate the development of these identities and practices, and it indicates means they can adopt to best do so.
This monograph investigates questions around new speakers of Breton, their identities, attitudes, and motivations, and how these intersect with linguistic practices. Investigating post-traditional contexts, it uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches to probe stereotypes around the language and speakers encountered in these settings. Focusing on the lexis in a sample of Breton gathered from radio, online, and print media sources, and on interviews carried out with professional users of Breton, this work illustrates the wide range of backgrounds and practices within the contemporary Breton language community and shows how speakers use Breton to position themselves within this diverse setting.
Virtually unstudied until the 1980s, discourse markers have gone on to become a growth industry. Research on markers is central to comprehensive theories of the synchronic linguistic system as such, of the use of language in communication, and of language change. From the very beginning, linguists working on Romance languages have been at the forefront of research on discourse markers. Including among its contributors many of the foremost experts in the field, this volume not only offers substantial state-of-the-art introductions to the diverse facets of contemporary research on discourse markers, with a focus on Romance, but it achieves added value by including in each chapter original and ...
This volume is the first dedicated to the comprehensive, in-depth analysis of constructions with nouns like ‘type’ and ‘sort’. It focuses on type noun constructions in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, integrating the different descriptive traditions that had been developed for each language family. As a result, a greater variety of type noun constructions is revealed than in the hitherto more fragmented literature. But attention is also drawn to the cross-linguistic similarity of the new pragmatic meanings, such as ad hoc and approximative categorization, hedging, focus and filler uses, and the new grammatical functions in NPs (e.g. phoric uses), clauses (e.g. adverbial uses) ...
This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on mann...
This study aims to investigate politeness in women s and men s speech, with a particular focus on the use of "c est-a-dire, enfin, hein "and "quoi "in contemporary spoken French." "Politeness is defined as going beyond the notion of the face-threatening act, englobing both everyday ideas of politeness and the creation of sociability in face-to-face interaction.The pragmatic particles studied are demonstrated to serve both psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic purposes: they lubricate reformulation and contribute to both sociability and social indexation.The study, which combines qualitative and quantitative analysis, is based on a corpus of spontaneous spoken French, comprising 155,000 words, 95 interviews and subjects ranging in age from 7 to 88 years. The sample contains speakers from a broader range of educational backgrounds than is often the case: a butcher, a video-salesman and a "toiletteur canin" rub shoulders with counter assistants, teachers and doctors.
In this paper, we investigate the evolution from imperatives to discourse markers in Romance, with a corpus-based approach. We focus on the case of items coming from verbs meaning 'to look', in a semasiological perspective: Spanish and Catalan mira, Portuguese olha, Italian guarda, French regarde, Romanian uite. We show that they all share many uses, among which turn-taking, introduction of reported speech, hesitation phenomenon, topic-shifting and modalization, except for French regarde. We then establish (against Waltereit, 2002) that the development of these uses is the result of a process