122250 AR Advanced Course in Linguistics (2019W)

Pragmatic Discourse Markers

Pragmatic discourse markers are items such as just, like, well, you-know, and so on. They used to be considered meaningless fillers. Now they are regarded as complex, multi-functional items which are produced under cognitive control and which are crucial for maintaining social relationships as well as an order to the the unfolding discourse. This seminar will unravel those complexities and functions in a range of items. To this end, use will be made of the SPICE-Ireland Corpus, where item functioning as pragmatic discourse markers are already annotated. The aim of the course is to analyse those annotated items in terms of the best prevailing theory or explanation for an item's behaviour. Because such markers are so universally useful, it will be expected that the behaviour in this corpus of relatively standardised Irish English will fall in line with findings elsewhere, but a secondary goal is always to hunt out any Irishisms in the data.

Students will be expected to make three presentations in class: one dealing with the annotated items well, like and you-know; one dealing with items which are not actually annotated in the corpus: really, anyway and the variable set of what's referred to as 'general extenders; (e.g. and things like that). The third presentation will relate to the choice of assignment topic: I know / I don't know; or I think / I don't think ; and yes/yeah etc. and no etc. as pragmatic discourse markers. By the end of the module, a student will be well drilled in analysing transcribed spoken corpus data and in analysing items with regard to their complex multi-functionality.