Abstract
This chapter investigates how learners of English who are native speakers of Dutch use general extenders such as and stuff and or something. The corpus consists of the Dutch component of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI), which is comprised of 50 interviews of some 15 min each. These data are compared with the Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation (LOCNEC), LINDSEI’s native speaker reference corpus. The study shows that overall frequencies of general extenders point at a close alignment of the two speaker groups, but that discrepancies exist if these numbers are further broken down for the adjunctive and disjunctive categories of general extenders. The former type is used considerably less frequently in the learner corpus than in the native, whereas the opposite holds for the latter. A detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis offers a few tentative explanations for the learners’ choice of general extenders, most notably L1 transfer, the intensity of exposure to certain forms in the target language, and learners’ restricted repertoire of pragmatic devices.
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Notes
- 1.
These items are also known under a plethora of competing terms, such as “set-marking tags” (e.g. Dines 1980) and “vague category identifiers” (e.g. Channell 1994), an overview of which can be found in Tagliamonte and Denis (2010: 335–336). I have chosen to adopt the term coined by Overstreet and Yule (1997), general extenders, because it has gained by far the widest currency in the field and does not (over)emphasize any particular function that such items can fulfil.
- 2.
There is no shortage of alternative terms for what are here referred to as pragmatic markers either. As a consequence, there is considerable variation in how these authors label the umbrella category containing such items as you know, I mean, so, well, the question tag innit, okay, look, and general extenders. It is clear from their descriptions of this category, though, that what they refer to is roughly the same.
- 3.
A similar approach has been adopted by Aijmer (2013: 132).
- 4.
The reported statistical output data are: the mean (M) and standard deviation (SD) for each corpus, the t-value with degrees of freedom in brackets, and the p-value indicating statistical significance if it is lower than 0.05.
- 5.
To perform this test the two-sample corpus frequency test wizard was used (http://sigil.collocations.de/wizard.html), which determines automatically whether chi-square or log-likelihood is the more appropriate test (Hoffmann et al. 2008: 85). The difference was found to be significant at p < 0.001.
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Appendix: Transcription Conventions
Appendix: Transcription Conventions
<Ir> | Interviewer turn starts |
<Iee> | Interviewee turn starts |
</Ir> | Interviewer turn ends |
</Iee> | Interviewee turn ends |
… | Empty pause: . (short), .. (medium), … (long) |
[] | Phonetic annotations (e.g. the[i:], a[ei]) |
: | Vowel lengthening (e.g. so:) |
= | Truncation |
<X> | Unintelligible word |
<overlap/> | Overlapping speech |
<foreign> | Foreign words |
<coughs> | Non-verbal sounds (e.g. coughing, laughing, sighing) and contextual comments (e.g. someone entering the room) are specified in angle brackets |
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Buysse, L. (2014). ‘We Went to the Restroom or Something’. General Extenders and Stuff in the Speech of Dutch Learners of English. In: Romero-Trillo, J. (eds) Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2014. Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06007-1_10
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