Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to the Language of Adolescents [#1019641]

Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to the Language of Adolescents By Gisle Andersen
2001 | 352 Pages | ISBN: 1588110184 | PDF | 2 MB
This title combines theoretical work in linguistic pragmatics and sociolinguistics with empirical work based on a corpus of London adolescent conversation. It makes a general contribution to the study of pragmatic markers as it proposes an analytical model that involves notions such as subjectivity, interactional and textual capacity, and the distinction between contextual alignment and divergence. These notions are defined according to how information contained in an utterance interacts with the cognitive environment of the hearer. Moreover, the model captures the diachronic development of markers from lexical items via processes of grammaticalization, arguing that markerhood may be viewed as a gradient phenomenon.