General extenders (GEs), expressions such as and things like that, are described in Overstreet and Yule (O&Y)'s new volume as having ‘a basic structure of conjunction plus noun phrase and are normally syntactically optional constituents that typically occur in phrase- or clause-final position’ (p. 1). GEs are either adjunctive (begin with and) or disjunctive (begin with or), and they can be short form and/or things or long form, which takes two different structures, either and/or things/stuff like that or an SKT (sort/kind/type of) form and that kind of thing. O&Y provide a reasoned argument (p. 5) for considering general extenders as pragmatic markers rather than discourse markers as they are multifunctional but most often serve to establish and maintain social cohesion, though they can be used for textual cohesion (more like discourse markers).
In addition to a definition of terms, the Introduction (chapter 1) details the contents of each chapter, sign-posting what is to come but also providing an excellent summary for readers who have little time to read the volume in its entirety (though I heartily recommend that they do so). First, then, in chapters 2–5 they cover the functions of GEs: referential, interpersonal, personal and textual, respectively; then their historical development (chapter 6), next their role as social markers (chapter 7), in different languages (chapter 8), in learner language and language teaching (chapter 9) and, finally, reflections and projections with perspectives for future research (chapter 10).
The authors are to be congratulated for the sensitivity and fine-grained nature of their analysis of the functions of GEs in chapters 2–5, for grouping the functions into coherent categories and subcategories and for the exemplification drawn from a wide range of already published works. GEs’ referential function (the one most often mentioned in the literature up to now) is to suggest activities which form a set or category: ‘swim and have picnics and stuff like that’, for example, suggests a category of ‘summer activities’. The GE has a list completion role which can coincide with turn completion (and hence a textual function). In its disjunctive form, a GE can have an interpersonal function in providing one's interlocutor with options, as in ‘do you want to go out or something?’ Adjunctives can also be used interpersonally to suggest a shared understanding. O&Y identify a personal function in the negative overtones of examples such as and all that nonsense/crap/junk/rubbish not to mention or whatever, which they highlight as being problematic for learners who might not realize that it can have a dismissive overtone unlike the structurally similar or something. This personal function also includes a positive evaluation, as in ‘with a swimming pool and everything’, which intensifies the overt admiration in the preceding element rather than suggesting more elements in the category.
An interesting exploitation of a GE is the use of and everything to express surprise, to maximize intensity or suggest that something is on the upper limit or end of a scale, as in ‘Her dad's kind of very well brought up. He went to Oxford and everything.’
By contrast, or anything is used in negative statements or questions such as ‘No shortness of breath or gasping for breath or anything’. The open-ended element is aimed at encouraging the patient to talk about their symptoms. Or anything can be used to talk about a minimum expectation not being met: ‘I felt so sad for him with no family or anything.’ This line of thinking culminates in the formulaic disclaimer ‘not…or anything but’ clause illustrated in ‘I wasn't trying to be nosey or anything but I saw the letters on her desk.’ The speaker pre-empts a potential criticism by already mentioning a negative quality, such as being nosey, and denying it. Certain GEs, such as or whatever, (and) blah, blah, blah or yada, yada, (yada), are used dismissively to suggest that the speaker is bored of the topic.
GEs have a textual function in both turn-completion and co-construction of turns, as they suggest shared knowledge. They have a bracketing or segmenting function when used with other pragmatic markers. The authors highlight the usefulness of or something/anything in word-search situations where hesitation phenomena like er are used alongside placeholders like thingy and whatsit. The GE keeps the text intentionally vague. The authors argue that some GEs such as and that function as punctors or end-markers (rather than being set-markers), a tendency seen with other pragmatic markers such as you know and other GEs like and stuff. The following sections focus on clusters of GEs with other pragmatic markers and, in my opinion, the main thrust of the argument concerning the textual use of GEs is lost – as pragmatic markers are highly frequent, it seems unsurprising to me that they should appear in the same utterance as a GE, i.e. their co-occurrence is arguably coincidental. I am also not persuaded by the argument that and that and similar expressions have a foregrounding function. It is undeniable that GEs end utterances (in English at any rate) and this perhaps occurs more often with a long form (and things like that) rather than a short form (and things) and could thus be argued to contribute to turn construction. I cannot help wondering, though, whether once again this is coincidental rather than strategic.
Moving on to the historical development and grammaticalization of GEs in chapter 6, ‘Historical development and change’ (pp. 98–124), the authors trace the semantic bleaching of expressions such as and stuff from its original sense of ‘personal property’ (in the year 1439) to a more general application to other entities. Specific GEs (and so on, and so forth, etc.) continue unchanged into present-day English and are associated with more formal written registers. (Many) other such and such other appear in Middle English but have dropped out of the language. And such (like) survives, according to O&Y, in archaic varieties of English. The authors detect a historic tendency for short forms (and such) to develop out of longer forms (and such other). The commonest disjunctive form in earlier times was or some other thing. Or something appears in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The approximating use spread from hedging the accuracy of reports to other uses (e.g. terminology) during the nineteenth century, at the end of which the long form or something like that appears. A similar development is seen in the disjunctive or any other thing > or anything (like that), the long form not being attested till the early 1900s, and from and moche other stuffe to and stuff like that. O&Y cite Tagliamonte & Denis (Reference Tagliamonte and Denis2010), who asserted that and things (like that) is dying out in favour of and stuff. They argue very convincingly that the GEs and/or things undergo grammaticalization as they are decategorialized – their conjunction (and/or) no longer has a logical coordination function. Forms like o'somth’n and or whatev exhibit morphological and phonological attrition and semantic bleaching/pragmatic enrichment. O&Y do not comment on the apparently anomalous development of the long forms (or something like that) out of the short forms (or something) – though they do come back to this in chapter 10, suggesting a process of lexical replacement whereby and stuff replaces and things while the long form and things like that remains but with a different function. Another alternative is, in my view, that they are the result of extravagance (Lehmann Reference Lehmann1985; Keller Reference Keller1990; Haspelmath Reference Haspelmath1999) and form part of a cycle of pragmaticalization (Mosegard-Hansen Reference Mosegaard Hansen2020). This would imply that these forms remain somehow in speakers’ mental lexicons in both grammaticalized (unconscious) forms (such as o'somth’n) and ungrammaticalized / more lexical (conscious) forms (such as or something). The likelihood of this is increased when we consider the alternation of person in PMs in Romance languages, such as si tu veux / si vous voulez (‘if you will’) in French. There is of course no reason why both processes should not be happening in tandem, with lexical replacement co-existing with the possibility of producing a more extravagant (in this case longer) form to produce or something like that.
In chapter 7, ‘Social marking and variation’ (pp. 125–50), the volume highlights the way GEs can be socially marked for age, gender, social class, register and in different varieties of English. This is the least sure-footed of the surveys of existing literature, no doubt given the dearth of whole-population studies of GEs. O&Y concede that there are some puzzles and contradictions in the data reported on age-related GE use, some studies showing higher and some lower frequencies in younger speakers. Forms with and stuff are far more frequent in younger speakers. O&Y conclude that this is a change in apparent time (rather than an age-graded phenomenon). On the basis of studies by Pichler & Levey (Reference Pichler and Levey2011) and Cheshire (Reference Cheshire2007), O&Y assert the predominance of and that in British English (as compared with the predominance of and stuff in Canada and New Zealand, and or something in the USA and Australia). The problem (which they recognize on p. 150) is that the British studies were conducted in particular localities in the north of England (Berwick-on-Tweed) and with working-class subgroups of the population, so it is risky to generalize to the population as a whole. My own intuition as a native speaker of British English is that and that is not the commonest form. A quick search of the Spoken BNC2014 corpus reveals that GE and that (excluding longer forms such as and that sort of thing and and that kind of stuff) occurs at a rate of 13 per million words by comparison with and stuff, which occurs at a rate of 305 per million words. The rise in frequency of and stuff is no doubt a recent development and a more in-depth study comparing the original BNC (1991) would shed light on this. The fact remains, though, that the GE and that is also socially marked (‘elderly’, ‘northern’, ‘working class’) and non-standard and it is thus misleading to include it as the top form in British English in table 7.5 on p. 144, particularly if foreign learners of English are led to believe this is the go-to form. One other niggle on accuracy: in this chapter, each example is marked as, for example, BrE, F, Adult, MC (British English, Female, Adult, Middle Class). It is not clear to me how O&Y have this information, and, in particular, I happen to know that example (8) from Nikolaou & Sclafani (Reference Nikolau, Sclafani, Beeching, Ghezzi and Molinelli2018) (marked BrE, F, Adult, MC) is not a British but a (Greek) American English speaker.
A very valuable aspect of the volume is its examination of GEs in different languages in chapter 8 (pp. 151–76). Much work on GEs has been conducted on English and the possibility of comparing these uses with other languages allows us to gauge the universality of their forms and functions. The coverage of GEs in Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Lithuanian, Persian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish is very much to be welcomed alongside the authors’ caveat concerning the reliability of translation of GEs into English and the fact that they are often omitted in translation.
In the context of the growing general consensus that language learners need to increase their pragmatic awareness, O&Y recommend the teaching and learning of GEs, as they are eminently learnable ‘chunks’ that fit in well with the lexical approach to language teaching. In chapter 9 ‘In learner language and language teaching’ (pp. 177–97), they even provide examples of exercise materials which can be used in the language teaching classroom, an extremely practical inclusion in a volume of this type.
In their final chapter, ‘Reflections and projections’ (pp. 198–214), the authors highlight once again the multi-functionality of GEs and how this aspect can get lost in the bid to pin down the functions of the different individual forms. Examples are provided in English and French which show how GEs can contribute to co-construction and the creation or rapport as well as marking the ends of turns in a textual manner. The other avenue which awaits further exploration is the GE which occurs in the middle of the utterance as part of subject or object noun phrases.
O&Y are careful to provide readers with definitions of technical terms and with references to seminal works, for example to Kristeva (Reference Kristeva1966/1982) when talking about intertextuality (p. 34), to Tarski (Reference Tarski and Woodger1935/1956) on metalanguage (p. 76), to Meillet (Reference Meillet1912), Lehmann (Reference Lehmann1985) and Heine & Traugott (Reference Heine and Traugott1991) on grammaticalization (p. 116). This, along with its excellent use of exemplification, makes the volume ideal for post-graduate and undergraduate students launching into projects on GEs, for which, as O&Y point out at various junctures in the book, there is ample scope, particularly in languages other than English. The book also serendipitously gives budding researchers guidance about methodology as problematic features arise in the text. On p. 85, for example, they highlight the dangers of aggregating data from a number of speakers when it could be that only one speaker in a dataset or corpus has a very high rate of (a specific) pragmatic marker or GE. Caveats about the availability of suitable data to study spoken features in the historical record are issued (p. 98) and the authors underline the speculative nature of any conclusions that can be drawn. The volume is also an object-lesson in the value not only of a comprehensive literature review of previous findings but also of drawing together data from previous studies and providing a new analysis. O&Y do not provide analysis of any new data of their own but do a fantastic job of pulling together insights and examples from a very wide range of previous studies of GEs.
This outstanding volume provides a highly incisive analysis of the forms and functions of GEs in both English and other languages, along with some coverage of their etymology and social meanings, with practical applications in language teaching and learning. It does so in a highly accessible way, not shunning technical terms where necessary, but providing excellent exemplification drawn from a wide range of existing works on GEs in an admirably eclectic manner. The authors thus demonstrate both depth and breadth of scholarship, the ability both to analyse examples bringing new insights and to synthesize and present information in a highly coherent and readable way.
