Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T21:09:16.491Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in England

from Part I - English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2024

By
Heike Pichler  and
Jenny Cheshire
Edited by
Susan Fox
Susan Fox
Affiliation:
Universität Bern, Switzerland
Get access

Summary

This chapter provides the first overview of regional variation in the frequency and sociolinguistic distribution of discourse-pragmatic items in England. We outline methodological and conceptual reasons for the historically limited knowledge of regional discourse-pragmatic variation, before addressing this gap by synthesising findings from individual research projects. We focus on comparing the distribution of selected discourse-pragmatic items from across different clause and utterance positions: general extenders, grammatically dependent negative-polarity question tags, invariant tags, focus markers, backchannel responses, attention signals, intensifiers, discourse like and quotatives. Notwithstanding acknowledged challenges in comparing results from individual studies, our overview reveals both striking cross-variety parallels in the distribution of these items, which we tentatively attribute to communicative factors, as well as robust patterns of regional variation, which we cautiously ascribe to regional socio-demographic differences that promote either linguistic conservatism or innovation.

Keywords

discourse-pragmatic variationgeneral extendersquestion tagsinvariant tagsfocus markersintensifiersbackchannel responsesquotativesdiscourse likeattention signals
Type
Chapter
Information
Language in Britain and Ireland , pp. 128 - 150
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aijmer, K. (2002). English Discourse Particles: Evidence from a Corpus. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aijmer, K. (2013). Understanding Pragmatic Markers: A Variational Pragmatic Approach. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Aijmer, K. (2018). ‘That’s well bad’: Some new intensifiers in spoken British English. In Brezina, V., Love, R. and Aijmer, K. (eds.), Corpus Approaches to Contemporary British Speech: Sociolinguistic Studies of the Spoken BNC2014. London: Routledge, pp. 60–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aijmer, K. (2021). ‘That’s well good’: A re-emergent intensifier in current British English. Journal of English Linguistics 49: 18–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aijmer, K. (2022). ‘That is totally not my type of film’: Innovations in the intensifier system of UK English. In Peterson, E., Hiltunen, T. and Kern, J. (eds.), Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change: Theory, Innovations, Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 127–49.Google Scholar
Andersen, G. (2001). Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to the Language of Adolescents. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andersen, G. (2016). Using the corpus-driven method to chart discourse-pragmatic change. In Pichler, H. (ed.), Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change in English: New Methods and Insights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderwald, L. (2002). Negation in Non-Standard British English: Gaps, Regularizations and Asymmetries. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnfield, K. and Buchstaller, I. (2010). Intensifiers on Tyneside: Longitudinal developments and trends. English World-Wide 31: 252–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartlett, J. (2013). ‘Oh I just talk normal, like’: A corpus-based, longitudinal study of constituent-final like in Tyneside English. Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics 19: 1–21.Google Scholar
Beal, J. (2004). English dialects in the North of England: Morphology and syntax. In Kortmann, B., Schneider, E., Burridge, K., Mesthrie, R. and Upton, C. (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English: A Multimedia Reference Tool, Vol. 1. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 113–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beeching, K. (2016). Pragmatic Markers in British English: Meaning in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Britain, D. (2007). Grammatical variation in England. In Britain, D. (ed.), Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 75–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buchstaller, I. (2011). Quotations across the generations: A multivariate analysis of speech and thought introducers across 5 decades of Tyneside speech. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 7: 59–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buchstaller, I. (2015). Exploring linguistic malleability across the lifespan: Age-specific patterns in quotative use. Language in Society 44: 457–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bueno-Amaro, J. (2022). Variation, Change and Grammaticalisation in Tyneside Teen Talk: A Sociolinguistic Study of Intensification and Emphasis. Unpublished PhD thesis, Newcastle University, UK.Google Scholar
Cheshire, J. (1981). Variation in the use of ain’t in an urban British English dialect. Language in Society 10: 365–81.Google Scholar
Cheshire, J. (2007). Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11: 155–93.Google Scholar
Cheshire, J. (2016). Epilogue: The future of discourse-pragmatic variation and change research. In Pichler, H. (ed.), Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change in English: New Methods and Insights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 252–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheshire, J. and Fox, S. (2009). Was/were variation: A perspective from London. Language Variation and Change 21: 1–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheshire, J. and Secova, M. (2018). The origins of new quotative expressions: The case of Paris French. Journal of French Language Studies 28: 209–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheshire, J. and Williams, A. (2002). Information structure in male and female adolescent talk. Journal of English Linguistics 30: 217–38.Google Scholar
Cheshire, J., Edwards, V. and Whittle, P. (1989). Urban British dialect grammar: The question of dialect levelling. English World-Wide 10: 185–225.Google Scholar
Cheshire, J., Kerswill, P. and Williams, A. (2005). Phonology, grammar, and discourse in dialect convergence. In Auer, P., Hinskens, F. and Kerswill, P. (eds.), Dialect Change: Convergence and Divergence in European Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 135–67.Google Scholar
Cheshire, J., Kerswill, P., Fox, S. and Torgersen, E. (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15: 151–96.Google Scholar
Childs, C. (2016). Canny good, or quite canny? The semantic-syntactic distribution of canny in the North East of England. English World-Wide 37: 238–66.Google Scholar
Childs, C. (2019). Interviewer effects on the phonetic reduction of negative tags, innit? Journal of Pragmatics 142: 31–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Childs, C. (2021). Mechanisms of grammaticalization in the variation of negative question tags. Journal of English Linguistics 49: 419–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Denis, D. (2010). Grammaticalization of General Extenders in York English. Unpublished manuscript, University of Toronto, Canada.Google Scholar
Denis, D. (2011). Innovators and innovation: Tracking the innovators of and stuff in York English. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 17: 61–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diewald, G. (2006). Discourse particles and modal particles as grammatical elements. In Fischer, K. (ed.), Approaches to Discourse Particles. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 403–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drummond, R. (2018). Researching Urban Youth Language and Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drummond, R. (2020). Teenagers swearing in the UK. English World-Wide 41: 59–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Durham, M., Haddican, B., Zweig, E., Johnson, D. E., Baker, Z., Cockeram, D., Danks, E. and Tyler, L. (2012). Constant linguistic effects in the diffusion of Be Like. Journal of English Linguistics 40: 316–37.Google Scholar
Ellis, A. (1889). On Early English Pronunciation. Part IV. London: Asher and Co.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erman, B. (1998). ‘Just wear the wig innit!’: From identifying and proposition-oriented to intensifying and speaker-oriented: Grammaticalisation in progress. In Haukioja, T. (ed.), Papers from the 16th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics. Turku: Department of Finnish and General Linguistics, University of Turku, pp. 87–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erman, B. (2001). Pragmatic markers revisited with a focus on you know in adult and adolescent talk. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1337–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox, S. (2012). Performed narrative: The pragmatic function of this is + speaker and other quotatives in London adolescent speech. In Buchstaller, I. and van Alphen, I. (eds.), Quotatives: Cross-Linguistic and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 231–58.Google Scholar
Fox, S. (2013). Varieties of English: Cockney. In Bergs, A. and Brinton, L. (eds.), Historical Linguistics of English (HSK 34.1). Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 2013–31.Google Scholar
Fraser, B. (1999). What are discourse markers? Journal of Pragmatics 14: 931–52.Google Scholar
Hancil, S. (2015). The grammaticalization of final but: From conjunction to final particle. In Hancil, S., Haselow, A. and Post, M. (eds.), Final Particles. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 197–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, R. (2006). New Ethnicities and Language Use. Basingstoke: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herat, M. (2018). You could so easily od like: Clause final and other pragmatic functions of like in Liverpool English speech. International Journal of Language Studies 12: 87–112.Google Scholar
Ilbury, C. (2021). ‘Ey, wait, wait, gully!’ Style, stance and the social meaning of attention signals in East London adolescent speech. English Language and Linguistics 25: 621–44.Google Scholar
Ito, R. and Tagliamonte, S. A. (2003). Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: Layering and recycling in English intensifiers. Language in Society 32: 257–79.Google Scholar
Kimps, D., Davidse, K. and Cornillie, B. (2014). A speech function analysis of tag questions in British English spontaneous dialogue. Journal of Pragmatics 66: 64–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kortmann, B. (2004). Synopsis: Morphological and syntactic variation in the British Isles. In Kortmann, B., Schneider, E., Burridge, K., Mesthrie, R. and Upton, C. (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English: A Multimedia Reference Tool, Vol. 2. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 1089–103.Google Scholar
Krug, M. (1998). British English is developing a new discourse marker, innit? A study in lexicalisation based on social, regional and stylistic variation. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 23: 146–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leemann, A., Kolly, M.-J. and Britain, D. (2018). The English dialect app: The creation of a crowdsourcing dialect corpus. Ampersand 5: 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levey, S. (2006). The sociolinguistic distribution of discourse marker like in preadolescent speech. Multilingua 25: 413–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levey, S. (2012). General extenders and grammaticalization: Insights from London preadolescents. Applied Linguistics 33: 357–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macaulay, R. M. K. (2013). Discourse variation. In Chambers, J. K. and Schilling, N. (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 220–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKenzie, L. (2018). Dialect surveys and student-led data collection. In Mallinson, C., Childs, B. and van Herk, G. (eds.), Data Collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and Applications, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, pp. 151–3.Google Scholar
McDonald, C. and Beal, J. (1987). Modal verbs in Tyneside English. Journal of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistics Association 9: 42–55.Google Scholar
Moore, E. and Podesva, R. (2009). Style, indexicality and the social meaning of tag questions. Language in Society 38: 447–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Núñez–Pertejo, P. and Palacios Martínez, I. (2018). Intensifiers in MLE: New trends and developments. Nordic Journal of English Studies 17: 116–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orton, H. (1962). Survey of English Dialects. Leeds: Arnold.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oxbury, R. (2021). Multicultural London English in Ealing: Sociophonetic and Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in the Speech of Children and Adolescents. Unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London.Google Scholar
Oxbury, R., Hunt, M. and Cheshire, J. (2023). Epistemic phrases and adolescent speech in West London. English Language and Linguistics 27: 815–48.Google Scholar
Palacios Martínez, I. (2011). ‘I might, I might go I mean it depends on money things and stuff’: A preliminary analysis of general extenders in British teenagers’ discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 2452–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Palacios Martínez, I. (2015). Variation, development and pragmatic uses of innit in the language of British adults and teenagers. English Language and Linguistics 19: 383–405.Google Scholar
Paradis, C. (2000). Degree modifiers of adjectives revisited: The nineties. In Kirk, J. (ed.), Corpora Galore: Analyses and Techniques in Describing English. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 147–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearce, M. (2011). ‘It isn’t geet good, like, but it’s canny’: A new(ish) dialect feature in North East England. English Today 27: 3–9.Google Scholar
Pichler, H. (2010). Methods in discourse variation analysis: Reflections on the way forward. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14: 581–608.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pichler, H. (2013). The Structure of Discourse-Pragmatic Variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pichler, H. (2016). Uncovering discourse-pragmatic innovations: innit in Multicultural London English. In Pichler, H. (ed.), Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change in English: New Methods and Insights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 57–85.Google Scholar
Pichler, H. (2021a). Grammaticalization and language contact in a discourse-pragmatic change in progress: the spread of innit in London English. Language in Society 50: 723–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pichler, H. (2021b). Tagging monologic narratives of personal experience: Utterance-final tags and the construction of adolescent masculinity. In Beaman, K. V., Buchstaller, I., Fox, S. and Walker, J. (eds.), Advancing Socio-Grammatical Variation and Change: Sociolinguistic Research in Honour of Jenny Cheshire. London: Routledge, pp. 377–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pichler, H. and Levey, S. (2010). Variability in the co-occurrence of discourse features. Language Studies Working Papers 2: 17–27.Google Scholar
Pichler, H. and Levey, S. (2011). In search of grammaticalisation in synchronic dialect data: General extenders in northeast England. English Language and Linguistics 15: 441–71.Google Scholar
Sebba, M. and Tate, S. (1986). You know what I mean? Agreement marking in British Black English. Journal of Pragmatics 10: 163–72.Google Scholar
Secova, M. (2017). Discourse-pragmatic variation in Paris French and London English: Insights from general extenders. Journal of Pragmatics 114: 1–15.Google Scholar
Snell, J. (2017). Enregisterment, indexicality and the social meaning of howay: Dialect and identity in north-east England. In Moore, E. and Montgomery, C. (eds.), Language and a Sense of Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 301–24.Google Scholar
Stenström, A.-B. (2000). It’s enough funny, man: Intensifiers in teenage talk. In Kirk, J. (ed.), Corpora Galore: Analyses and Techniques in Describing English. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 177–90.Google Scholar
Stenström, A.-B., Andersen, G. and Hasund, I. K. (2002). Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus Compilation, Analysis and Findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Stratton, J. M. (2020). ‘That’s proper cool’: The emerging intensifier proper in British English. English Today 36: 1–8.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, S. A. (1998). Was/were variation across the generations: View from the city of York. Language Variation and Change 10: 153–91.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, S. A. (2013). Roots of English: Exploring the History of Dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, S. A. and D’Arcy, A. (2007). Frequency and variation in the community grammar: Tracking a new change through the generations. Language Variation and Change 19: 199–217.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, S. A. and Hudson, R. (1999). Be like et al. beyond America: The quotative system in British and Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3: 147–72.Google Scholar
Torgersen, E., Gabrielatos, C. and Hoffmann, S. (2018). A corpus-based analysis of the pragmatic marker you get me. In Friginal, E. (ed.), Studies in Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics. London: Routledge, pp. 176–96.Google Scholar
Torgersen, E., Gabrielatos, C., Hoffmann, S. and Fox, S. (2011). A corpus-based study of pragmatic markers in London English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 7: 93–118.Google Scholar
Traugott, E. C. (2016). On the rise of types of clause-final pragmatic markers in English. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 17: 26–54.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. (1999). The Dialects of England, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Woolford, K. (2021). Just in Tyneside English. World Englishes 40(4): 578–93.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×