No Way!

no, not me, no way, no how!

It’s well known that negation is more frequent in spoken language than in writing. This is hardly surprising: after all, speech acts such as denials, refusals and rejections are typical of face-to-face interaction. It seems more surprising, though, to learn that in spoken English teenagers use negatives more frequently than adults do.

This is what Ignacio Palacios Martínez discovered in his analysis of the Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT). He compared the use of negation in the teenage corpus with adult speech, mainly using the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English. Whereas the teenagers used about 33 negative words and structures in every 1000 words, the adults used only about 23 – a difference that was statistically significant.

The reason, Martínez suggests, lies at least in part in the nature of teenage language. About one third of the teenagers’ negatives occurred in imperatives, commands, orders, strong suggestions, directions, instructions and refusals. Martínez argues that this is because teenagers like to be direct, straightforward and spontaneous when they are talking to each other.  The adults, by contrast, tended to use more roundabout expressions to carry out the same kinds of speech act, which resulted in a lower number of negatives overall. The teenagers were just as direct when expressing an opinion, and this also often led to their using negation. Adults were more inclined to hedge their opinions using indefinite or vague expressions.

A further characteristic of the teenagers’ speech was the use of several negatives in a string, which increased the force of the negation. The example in the first box shows a string of this kind.

this geezer from Bedlam yeah got stopped the other day in this car, yeah, he was pissed, he was tripping and he was speeding yeah, no not, no licence; no tax, no ruddy insurance yeah

The second box contains an example of another tendency found in the teenage corpus: this is the use of negatives as a kind of ritualized play, where one speaker immediately contradicts the other.

S: no I never

J: yes you did

S: <laughing> I never

J: he saw your body

S: I never

J: and ever since then, face it S!

S: no shut your mouth! Shut up!

Although both adults and teenagers sometimes used fixed negative expressions to strengthen the negative force of what they were saying, the particular expressions differed. Adults tended to use not at all as a stronger term than no, whereas teenagers preferred no way. Teenagers also used idioms such as I couldn’t give a toss, and negative forms such as nope, nah and dunno. They also used innovative forms like uncool (meaning the opposite of being trendy or fashionable). Negative concord (e.g. I didn’t get no matches) was more frequent in the teenage corpus too, as was nonstandard never (e.g. Vernon never called for me yesterday), though Martinez points out that this may reflect the social class or regional origins of the speakers, which he could not take into account in his analyses.  Social factors such as these may interact with the psychological development of adolescents, which accounts for their tendency to be direct and to experiment and play with language, but all these issues need further investigation.

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Martínez, Ignacio M. Palacios (2011) The expression of negation in British Teenagers’ Language: A Preliminary Study. Journal of English Linguistics 39: 4-35.

doi 10.1177/0075424210366905

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Okay, that's my cue

Will computers sound completely human-like in the future?

Words like okay, alright and right pose a particular challenge for automatic speech recognition because they have a wide range of functions in conversation.  As a result, words with such a variety of uses can be ambiguous in their interpretation.  In natural conversation, their meaning can be interpreted through their position in the utterance and, importantly, various auditory and acoustic cues, such as the intonation pattern.  However, in computational systems such as TTS (Text-to-Speech), how can the correct intonation pattern be assigned to a word such as okay if the system cannot decide which function it is serving in the utterance?

Agustin Gravano, Julia Hirschberg and Štefan Beňuš analysed a group of words classified as Affirmative Cue Words (ACWs) for their acoustic and prosodic similarities and differences, to see how these properties could help with computational disambiguation. The functions of ACWs include showing agreement, showing interest and signalling the beginning or end of a topic. Gravano, Hirschberg and Benus found ten potentially different functions of ACWs , though only okay and alright are versatile enough to be used in all ten ways. 

The data they used came from a recorded corpus known as the Columbia Games Corpus which represents 13 Standard American English speakers.  They identified 5,456 ACWs which represented 7.8% of the speech. Of these, the 6 most common were alright, okay, yeah, mm-hm, uh-huh and right.   However, in order to make sure the data wasn’t dominated by one speaker (and therefore skew the results), the data was levelled so that it represented all speakers as equally as possible.

Looking at the position of the words, they found that alright and okay were used in similar positions in the utterance, and that mm-hm and uh-huh also showed similar distribution patterns (frequently when there was a pause either side of the word so that it stood alone), with their primary functions either as backchannels (showing that the listener was following) or to show agreement.  They suggest that this means that the members of each pair can be used interchangeably.

In addition to position and function, they looked at factors such as intonation pattern, intensity, duration, pitch and voice quality.  In doing this, they could identify the acoustic and prosodic features which were more likely to indicate a particular function of a single ACW.

Using this data, the researchers conducted a number of experiments which tested the ability of computational systems to recognise and correctly classify the function of the ACWs in their data.  They noted that their approach allowed for the inclusion of a wide range of available information, which led to greater accuracy in classification.  However, of all the factors incorporated into the experiments, data related to the ACW’s position in the intonational phrase turned out to be the most important factor in disambiguating the function of these words. For example, right was the only ACW that could be used with a checking function (e.g. through its use in tags – “it’s there, right?”) and this was one of the few instances where an ACW could be found at the end of an intonational phrase.

They conclude that, by analysing and incorporating a wide range of acoustic and prosodic characterisations in computational testing and subsequent programming, spoken dialogue systems (such as those which aim to both recognise and produce speech) will be able to improve their performance and take one step closer to emulating human speech.

__________________________________________________

Gravano, A., Hirschberg, J. and Beňuš, Š. (2012) Affirmative Cue Words in Task-Oriented Dialogue. Computational Linguistics 38:1-39

Doi:10.1162/COLI_a_00083

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

How four-year-olds use language to make friends

How do children initiate friendships?

Research studies have shown that friendships are important to children and that they offer them emotional support. Some studies have shown that children who have good quality friendships have higher self-esteem, better peer interactions generally and do better at school. But how do children as young as four years old know how to initiate and maintain friendships? What linguistic strategies do they use? Amanda Bateman has been looking at the way children use pro-terms ‘we’ and ‘us’ in the co-construction of new friendship networks when they first start primary school.

Bateman’s study took place in Wales, where children start school at four years old. The research was conducted approximately three weeks after the children’s first day at primary school. Thirteen four-year-old children (6 girls, 7 boys) were videoed and recorded during their morning playtime, one child per morning over a three-week period. Interactions in which the children used the words ‘we’ and ‘us’ in their social alignments with each other were transcribed and analysed.

In one example, Bateman demonstrates how a four-year-old girl initiates a friendship with a boy firstly using the collective pro-term ‘we’ ‘why don’t we just..’ and then follows with the use of a possessive pronoun to invite him to her party ‘will you come to my party’ successfully achieving her desired affiliation with him as he accepts her offer.

Bateman also shows how once friendships have been initiated, they are protected and maintained, as in the following example:

Emma:                       kerry do you want to play mums and dads

Kerry:                        no we’re playing families

Kathy:                        no

In this interaction Emma approaches the other two children and asks Kerry if she wants to play mums and dads. Kerry rejects the offer and uses the collective pro-term ‘we’ to show that she is already affiliated to Kathy. This establishes Kerry and Kathy as an exclusive friendship, from which Emma is excluded. Kathy’s use of emphatic ‘no’ also serves to protect their exclusive friendship.

The study shows that the pro-terms ‘we’ and ‘us’ help children to verbally affiliate themselves with another child in order to establish a friendship. Equally, though, the same pro-terms can also be used to exclude other children who are not accepted as being part of the friendship group. Interestingly, the study aligns with findings from studies conducted years and countries apart, leaving Bateman to suggest that children worldwide use the same strategies when co-constructing social alignment on an everyday basis. The researcher also concludes by drawing attention to the creativity and social competencies in social organization processes in children as young as four years old.

 _______________________________________________________

Bateman, A. (2012). Forging friendships: The use of collective pro-terms by pre-school children. Discourse Studies14 (2): 165-180.

DOI: 10.1177/1461445611433630

This summary was written by Sue Fox

I got oot of the car and I gied inside this tiny, peerie hoose! *

The Shetland Islands provide an interesting site for studying dialect death

What is happening to the Shetland Islands dialect? Is this distinctive dialect dying out along with many other traditional dialects as research on British varieties in recent years has indicated? Researchers Jennifer Smith (University of Glasgow) and Mercedes Durham (University of Aberdeen) conducted a sociolinguistic study in order to test such claims as they relate to the Shetland Islands, focusing specifically on the main town of Lerwick, the commercial and industrial centre of Shetland.

The Shetland Islands are situated in the North Sea, between Norway to the east and Scotland to the south. The Vikings invaded Shetland in the 9^th Century and while the dialect is described as a variety of Scots, there are still traces of the Viking language, Norn, in evidence. The dialect has a number of features which are unique to the Shetland Isles but also others which are used more widely throughout Scotland.

Thirty adults were sampled in the study (15 male, 15 female), divided equally into three different age groups - 17-21 years, 45-55 years, and 70+ years old – to represent three generations of speakers. The study used spontaneous speech, elicited during sociolinguistic interviews lasting 1-2 hours conducted in each participant’s home.

The researchers report on six features. The first two are lexical items, peerie (a Shetland-specific word to mean small, tiny, little as in the title above) and ken (a Scotland-wide word to mean know). The second pair of features are grammatical structures: the Shetland-specific use of the verb Be as in ‘they were been coopers as well’ where standard English would have the verb Have i.e. ‘they had been coopers as well’, and secondly, the more Scotland-wide use of yon to mean that, as in the example ‘what’s yon?’ Finally, the researchers consider two phonological features: the Shetland-specific use of [d] to replace the <th> in words such as that, then, those and the use of the more Scotland-wide feature of pronouncing words such as all, ball and call as a’, ba’ and ca’.

The results of the analysis of all six features reported on in this paper showed that there is a steady decline in the use of the local, traditional forms in favour of more standardised forms across the three generations of speakers. The results therefore seem to confirm reports that the local dialect is disappearing in the Shetland Islands. However, there is an interesting twist in the tale. The speakers in the two older generations of speakers all seem to pattern in the same way but the younger speakers show a sharp divide; some of the younger speakers show high rates (in some cases even higher rates than the older generations) in the use of local forms while other young speakers have very high rates of the newer, standard forms. The researchers considered all kinds of reasons why this might be the case, for example gender, networks, time spent away from the island and attitudes towards Lerwick and the Shetland Isles generally but none of these influences seemed to provide the answer as to why there was such a split among the young speakers. These results highlight the fact that a complex array of factors are involved in the process of language change and dialect attrition and the change does not neccesarily follow a regulated or gradual pattern. More and more, sociolinguists are focusing on the use of language by individuals in the community and this study would seem to highlight further need for this kind of close investigation. In fact, the researchers suggest that future research by way of a more in-depth ethnographic study of the Shetland Isles may reveal the reasons for the split among the younger age group. It would also provide close monitoring of a dialect undergoing attrition while it is actually happening.

* The title of this article can be glossed as ‘I got out of the car and I went inside this tiny, little house’

Smith, J. and Durham, M. (2011). A tipping point in dialect obsolescence? Change across the generations in Lerwick, Shetland. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/2: 197-225.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00479.x

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Yerr ‘aving a laarf aintcha?

It can be a noun or an adjective; it’s used throughout the media (usually negatively) to describe a certain type of person or behaviour; and it was Oxford University Press’ ‘word of 2004’.  It is, if you haven’t guessed already, the word chav. The Oxford English Dictionary defines chav as:

a young person of a type characterised by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear): usually with connotations of low social status

Indeed, it’s this social stereotype that Joe Bennett investigated to see if there was a correlation with the language that’s known as chavspeak.  One point of particular interest, he notes, is that the identity of ‘chav’ is not something with which people voluntarily align themselves. Instead, chavs are always viewed as ‘other people’.  This in itself suggests that there is a very negative evaluation attached to the term.  So what about chavspeak?

Bennett compared two ‘humour books’ that aimed to describe not only the supposed social aspects and cultural practices of so-called chavs, but also what is thought to be characteristic of chavspeak.  In doing this, he wanted to investigate the links between linguistic forms and social practice – why were certain linguistic forms chosen? And, how do these linguistic forms work to characterise and strengthen the view that chavs are representative of an underclass in society?

At the discourse level, chavspeak is presented in the humour books as demonstrating communicative incompetence and rudeness. Bennett points out that this is enhanced by the type of ‘translation’ provided.  For example:

Giss a fag, mate?   ‘Excuse me, but can you let me have one of your cigarettes please?’

Yerr ‘aving a laarf aintcha?   ‘Are you jesting?’

This is also the case at the lexical level, where regular English words said to be typical of chavspeak are ‘translated’, drawing on themes such as crime and public disorder:

Shoplifting: ‘the favoured hobby, or indeed job, of most Chavs’

The social connotations exploited by the writers of the humour books in these examples serve to underline the lower class status of anyone who attracts the label of ‘chav’.  However, the most linguistically salient exploitation of social connotations can be found in the phonological features said to be characteristic of chavspeak, shown in the two books by the spelling the writers use. Both the books examined by Bennett mention TH fronting (spelling brother as brovva), glottal stops (with aunty  spelt aun’ie), h-dropping (have spelt ‘ave), <n > at the end of words like runnin and monophthongisation of the MOUTH vowel (mouth spelt maaf).  Each of these phonological features has urban and/ or working class connotations and many are (rightly or wrongly) associated with Cockney English by non-linguists. These spellings therefore link with the assertion in one of the books (Chav!) that chavspeak is some sort of Cockney hybrid.  Bennett notes that these phonological features are the ones that British speakers tend to strongly  associate with people from the lower social classes.

Bennett concludes that chavspeak is a social construct that is continually reinforced by those who draw on existing social stereotypes in order to create it.  He cautions that, while those who exploit the chav stereotype in the media do so under the guise of humour and innocent intentions, this only serves to strengthen what is a negative stereotype. This humour could therefore incubate the type of prejudice that exists in relation to other social stereotypes, and can be a resource for the maintenance of social relations of power.

___________________________________________________

           

Bennett, Joe (2012) ‘And what comes out may be a kind of screeching’: The stylisation of chavspeak in contemporary Britain’. Journal of Sociolinguistics 16:5-27

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00521.x

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

Just your Donald!

Donald Duck makes a surprising appearance in rhyming slang in Scotland!

       

Does just your Donald make sense to you? It is rhyming slang, where a word is replaced by an expression – usually two words, each stressed – that rhymes with it. To make things more confusing, the rhyming expression is sometimes shortened to just the first word, so that the meaning becomes less predictable. Here, luck is replaced by Donald Duck, which is then shortened to Donald.

Antonio Lillo tells us that this type of wordplay began in the first half of the 19^th century as a secret code among the lower classes and the underworld in London. This is why it’s often associated with Cockney. Later, rhyming slang spread to Australia, South Africa and the USA (though in the USA it is still used only by the criminal classes). Within the UK, it travelled to other large urban areas and in many of them ‘home-grown’ rhymes developed, including in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Belfast and Dublin. According to Lillo, though, nowhere was rhyming slang cultivated with as much enthusiasm as in Glasgow – partly because of the powerful working class ethos of the population and partly because of strong links between Glasgow gangs and the London underworld.

Population movement and the electronic media have produced ‘supra-local’ rhyming slang expressions, such as Britney Spears for ‘beers’ or Fat Boy Slim for ‘gym’. Nevertheless many expressions are still heard only in specific urban or national varieties of English, including the variety that is his focus here – Scottish English.

Rhyming slang in Scottish English falls into two main categories. The first, arguably the largest, contains expressions borrowed from elsewhere, especially Cockney (such as tea leaf, ‘thief’) but also Irish English (Margaret Thatcher, ‘scratcher’ in the sense of ‘bed’) and Australian English (septic or septic tank, ‘Yank’).

The second group consists of home-grown Scottish rhyming slang. Lillo gives a glossary at the end of his article containing about 200 modern expressions of this type. It includes expressions not heard elsewhere, like Barr’s Irn-Bru, ‘clue’, in the title of the article. Irn Bru is the brand name of a fruit-flavoured soft drink which is popular in Scotland, manufactured by A. G. Barr plc. The category also includes Scottish expressions that have made their way into other varieties of English, such as Gardner Spiers, ‘beers’, after the Scottish footballer and manager. This is heard in Yorkshire as well as in Scotland.

One characteristic of Scottish rhyming slang is that expressions with two nouns, like the Cockney trouble and strife, ‘wife’, are rare.  Perhaps this is because the younger generation of Scots find them old-fashioned. A second characteristic is a particular liking for rhymes based on proper nouns. For example, Tony Blair, used generally in the UK and Ireland to mean ‘hair’ (the old Tony Blair needs a cut) is used in the plural in Scotland to mean ‘stairs’ (he’s doon the Tony Blairs). These characteristics, though, are typical of modern rhyming slang in general. What is distinctive about Scottish expressions is the name that the rhyme is often based on. Unlike Cockney rhyming slang, which takes its proper names from all aspects of modern culture around the world, Scottish speakers have a bias towards both people and things that are specifically Scottish (as already seen in the Irn Bru and Gardner Speirs examples).  Lillo draws attention to an abundance of the names of footballers, perhaps due to a particular liking for rhyming slang amongst males in Scotland and to an age-old Scottish connection between football and national identity. However football is not the only national icon enshrined in Scottish rhyming slang: Lillo points out that although Armadillo, ‘pillow’, may seem odd to non-Scottish ears it will be familiar to anyone who recognises the metaphorical nickname of the Clyde Auditorium in Glasgow. Rhyming slang can therefore function as an effective marker of national identity and pride for the Scottish people who use it.

__________________________________________________

Lillo, Antonio (2012) Nae Baar’s Irn Bru whit ye’re oan aboot: Musings on modern Scottish rhyming slang. English World-Wide 33: 61-94.

doi 10.1075/eww.33.1.04lil

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

That’s cool and stuff

Recent research by Martínez adds another twist to the story of general extenders in spoken English. These are phrases such as and stuff, and things like that, and or something, as in I like pizzas and stuff or do you want to go out tonight or something? They are usually assumed to be typical of teenage speech, but Martínez found that it’s actually adults who use them most often, not teenagers.

Previous summaries on this blog report other recent research on general extenders (GEs) in spoken discourse: see http://linguistics-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/spoken-language-and-stuff-like-that.html; http://linguistics-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/young-peoples-language-and-stuff-like.html

Martínez analysed the use of general extenders in two large collections of spontaneous informal spoken English, one from teenagers (the Corpus of London Teenage Language, or COLT) and one from adults (the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English, or DCPSE). He discovered that adults used 18 general extender forms in every 10,000 words, whereas the teenagers used only 12 in every 10,000 words. Or something was the most frequent form in both corpora, but apart from this there were interesting differences in the forms used by teenagers and adults. The teenagers used and stuff, and that and and everything much more frequently than the adults – so frequently, in fact, that these three forms accounted for over 35 per cent of all their general extender forms. For adults, on the other hand, the most frequent forms after or something were and things and and things like that. These were relatively rare amongst the teenagers.  A striking difference between the two corpora was that the adults used a more varied set of general extender forms than the teenagers, including and so on, or so and or whatever. These other forms were all relatively infrequent in teenage speech.

Martínez then focussed on three of the frequent forms (and stuff, and everything and and things (like that) and examined how their use had developed over time. He used corpus data from two different time periods: 1958-1977 and 1990-1993. All three of the general extender forms had increased in use in the more recent period, especially and stuff, which did not occur at all in the recordings made in the 1960s.

These phrases are termed ‘general extenders’ because they often indicate that the previous word is part of a set that the addressee and the speaker both know about, so they extend the meaning of that word without the speaker having to specify all the members of the set. So shall we go out tonight or something suggests that the speaker assumes the person they are talking to will know what other similar kinds of things they might like to do that evening – perhaps stay in and watch TV, or invite a friend round.  Martínez found that both adults and teenagers used general extenders not only in this way but also to separate out one stretch of speech from another. For example they were used at the end of reported speech, as in my mum was saying “sometimes you’re too pissed to stop and you just carry on and stuff”. They also created rapport between the speakers, sometimes at the same time as separating out stretches of speech: in the example above, for example, the speaker’s friend responded with yeah, showing that they understood and sympathised. 

Martínez points out that researchers have taken for granted the idea that general extenders are typical of face-to-face interaction but that this assumption has never been put to the test. He therefore looked for general extenders in both the written and spoken sections of the ICE-GB Corpus (the International Corpus of English for Great Britain).  Only or so occurred with a similar frequency in the spoken and written sections, in each case only 4 times in every 100,000 words. Overall general extenders occurred almost one hundred times more often in spoken English than in written English.

It seems clear, then that general extenders are a characteristic of our spoken language. Surprisingly, though, this is perhaps more so for adults than for the teenagers who are so often criticised for using them.

____________________________________________

Martínez, Ignacio M. Palacios (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: 2452-2470.

doi: 10.1016/jpragma.2011.02.011

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Which way round?

Rich and famous or famous and rich?

Why do we say rich and famous rather than famous and rich? Or profit and loss rather than loss and profit? Born and bred and past and present, but not bred and born or present and past?

Several reasons have been suggested, but they have never been put to the test. Sandra Mollin has now done this, by looking at the most frequent word pairs that occur in the 100 million word British National Corpus. She analysed 544 different word pairs, which together occurred more than 85,000 times in the corpus.

Mollin found that the most important factor determining the order of words in the pair was to do with their meaning – a semantic constraint. Three different kinds of meaning relationships were relevant. Iconicity explained the ordering in the pair best: this is when the order of the words follows a chronological sequence or a cause and effect sequence, as in spring and summer or born and bred. Power was also important: words referring to more powerful concepts are more likely to come first in the pair, as (so, men and women) and so are concepts that are more central in our society (food and drink, then, rather than drink and food). Perceptual markedness was also relevant: the order of words in the pair often follows what humans seems to perceive as a natural order, such as seeing positive as more important than negative (good and bad), or seeing things that are higher up as more important (head and shoulders, top and bottom). Mollin found that clashes between semantic factors were very rare and in fact only involved gender pairs such as mother and father or bride and groom. In these cases the male should be first in the pair from the perspective of power, but the female is typically perceived as more central in the parental role than the male, and is the more prominent person in a wedding, so it is perceptual markedness that wins out in these cases.

Would you like to help Sandra Mollin with her research into word pairs? If so, there is a survey at http://ww2.unipark.de/uc/mollin_Universit__t_Heidelberg/f6fa/

that should take about only 6 minutes of your time.

The next most important factor was a metrical one, to do with the rhythm of speech. This means, for example, that the longer of the two words will come last (so, out and about or past and present), and final stressed syllables are avoided (gas and electricity rather than electricity and gas). When metrical ordering factors clash with semantic factors, it is semantic factors that usually decide which word comes first. Often, though, metrical and semantic factors coincide.

The frequency with which individual words are used is also relevant. More frequent words tend to come first in the pair (so, up and down, or time and effort).

If none of these factors can account for the ordering, phonology (sound structure) comes into play. For example, if one of the words has more consonants at the beginning, this word comes second (so, ups and downs, where up begins with a vowel so has no initial consonant at all whereas downs has one initial consonant; or coal and steel, where coal has one consonant at the beginning but steel has two). The same ordering applies for words that have more consonants at their end (so, design and development rather than development and design, where design is pronounced with a single final consonant and development with two; or for and against, where against has 2 final consonants but for has either one or none, depending on the variety of English – American speakers, for example, usually pronounce the final /r/).

Mollin found that only 18 per cent of the pairs never occurred in the reverse order. These ‘frozen’ pairs were mainly those whose ordering was in terms of power. The vast majority of pairs, then, could be reversed, though most had a preferred order. The likelihood of a pair occurring in the reverse order depended on the type of factor governing the order, with pairs satisfying the semantic constraints of power and iconicity less likely to occur the other way round and the least reversible pairs satisfying both semantic and metrical constraints. This accounts for rich and famous, which seems to be almost completely frozen: famous and rich occurred only once in the BNC.  Knowledge and skills, by contrast, occurred just as often as skills and knowledge.

Mollin points out that once a certain threshold of frequency has been reached for the pronunciation of a pair in a particular order, ‘freezing’ becomes an inevitable process. This would mean that enough speakers had internalised the sequence in a fixed order, and therefore only produce it in that order, for enough other speakers to hear the sequence only in that order. They too would then pronounce the pair exclusively in that order and internalise it as a frozen sequence. In turn more and more speakers will hear the pair in only one order, until eventually it is a completely frozen sequence that never changes.

--------------------------------------------

Mollin, Sandra (2011). Revisiting binomial order in English: ordering constraints and reversibility. Journal of English Language and Linguistics 16: 81-103.

doi. 10.1017/S1360674311000293

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Have you seen our website?

English Language Teaching: Linguistic Resources

http://www.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/englishlanguageteaching

Our site is an archive of Spoken English Language Teaching resources. In addition to the Linguistics Research Digest, the resources consist of:

o   A databank of spoken London English (containing sound clips and transcripts)

o   Language Investigations

o   A description of spoken English features

The materials have been designed for teachers of GCSE and GCE A-Level English Language, but they may be useful for anyone involved in teaching about the spoken English language.

Discourse-pragmatic markers take centre stage in spontaneous spoken language

Discourse markers play a central role in unplanned communication

What are discourse-pragmatic markers? They are features of speech which generally do not contribute to the propositional content of communication but which have important functions in the way that we manage our conversations.  Researcher Jean E. Fox Tree takes a look at what constitutes a discourse marker (DM), what they do, what is known about children’s and second language learners’ acquisition of discourse markers and how they can vary across settings and speakers. 

Fox Tree provides an inventory of some of the discourse markers that have been investigated in previous research studies and includes such features as like, well, you know, I mean, and everything, sort of, kind of, and, but, so, because and you see. There are many others. Switch on the radio or TV and listen to a spontaneous interview or discussion and you’ll hear that the speech of people from all spheres of life is littered with these constructions. So if discourse markers do not add anything to the content of the interaction why do they exist? Most researchers agree that discourse markers fulfil many functions and that they are important, if not vital, to successful communication.

The fact that discourse markers fulfil so many different functions makes it difficult to know which function applies in a particular context. One solution has been to assign a core meaning (or basic meaning) to the discourse marker and to consider all other uses as interpretations built on that core meaning. As a demonstration, Fox Tree discusses the basic meaning of like (when it is used as a DM) as ‘indicating upcoming loose language’ or as being a ‘deliberate marker of vagueness’. An example might be ‘I was there at like 3 o’clock and stayed for like two hours’ where the speaker might want to indicate vague timings. Another example she gives is the use of discourse marker well and suggests that the core meaning is to indicate to a listener that a less-obvious interpretation of some aspect of the discourse is coming. Think about when someone says something and then another person says, ‘Well, not necessarily…..’ and proceeds to give a different explanation/interpretation. Not only is a different interpretation given but the use of well also softens the disagreement.

Fox Tree also discusses the acquisition of discourse markers in first and second language learners. As far as children acquiring discourse markers as part of their first language is concerned, research has generally found that children use a narrower range of discourse markers with a narrower range of functions. There is evidence to suggest that children are still learning to use discourse markers in adult-like ways after the age of nine years old. The acquisition of discourse markers for second language learners is also developmental; their use increases along with increased proficiency and as speakers modify their speech in line with their new environment (if applicable).

One very interesting aspect that Fox Tree discusses is the use of discourse markers in computer-mediated discourse. In the past, it has generally been considered that writing is carefully planned and would therefore not entail the use of the discourse markers discussed above, which are seen primarily as features of speech. However, modern communicative technologies have blurred the distinction between speech and writing; written communication such as email, instant messaging and texting is much closer to speech than earlier forms of writing. This has brought with it ‘a wealth of written discourse marker use’ because users of these forms of communication tend to treat the interactions rather like a conversation. Discourse markers found in instant messaging include I mean, you know, well, oh, I dunno and like. The frequencies of use shown in studies so far have tended to be lower in instant messaging compared to conversations but this is a fruitful area for future research and for monitoring the development of discourse markers in these forms of written communication.

Although discourse markers are many and their functions are varied and often contradictory, they nevertheless all have a central role in helping people to negotiate their way through unplanned, unrehearsed communication. Seen in this way, discourse markers should not be viewed as meaningless and superfluous but as vital components of speech which are ‘conventionalised, learned expressions that provide information about how the content of messages should be interpreted’.

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Fox Tree, Jean. E. 2010. Discourse Markers across Speakers and Settings. Language and Linguistics Compass 4/5: 269-281.

doi: 10.1111/j. 1749-818x.2010.0015.x

This summary was written by Sue Fox