Britt Erman

Pragmatic markers revisited with a focus on you know in adult and adolescent talk.

The two main questions this paper addresses are: Do adolescent speakers use the pragmatic marker you know differently from adult speakers in spontaneous interaction and do the results support the hypothesis that this pragmatic marker is undergoing a change in meaning and function? The results from the present corpus-based study answer the first of these questions in the affirmative. Young speakers increasingly seem to be using this marker as a metalinguistic monitor with a modal function emphasizing the force of the speech-act and as a social monitor eliciting a reaction from the addressee(s); adults, in contrast, primarily use the marker to build up a text, and create coherence, the marker functioning as a textual monitor. As for the second question, the results appear to point to an ongoing change in the use of you know. The direction of the change speaks for the marker being further pragmaticalized, and thus having at least a potential for being grammaticalized and ending up as a grammatical morpheme.

Multiword Structures in Different Materials, and with Different Goals and Methodologies

Following an overview of early frequency-based research of recurring word combinations and patterns, three current methods within SLA focusing spoken and written production are presented. Studies within each of these methodological paradigms are compared from qualitative aspects, such as medium, size of material, control of task, topic and discipline. This is followed by a presentation of a small-scale empirical study using two of these methods, the lexical bundle method and the ‘comprehensive’ method, applied to the same spoken material of very advanced Swedish users of L2 English and L2 Spanish and native English and Spanish controls. Both methods are usage-based, scanning entire texts for multiword structures, one computer-driven, the lexical bundle method, and one largely manual, the comprehensive method. This small-scale study has shown that two different methods, yielding different results, can fruitfully be used together, not only to inform and complement one another, but to broaden our knowledge of what being nativelike involves, not to mention the vast implications such increased knowledge may have for teaching and learning an L2.

There is no such thing as a free combination: a usage-based study of specific construals in adverb–adjective combinations

The study is aimed at revealing collocational adverb-adjective patterns in the British National Corpus (BNC). The adverbs selected for the study include the maximizers absolutely, completely, entirely, fully, perfectly, totally, utterly, wholly. The study involves searches on both the selected adverbs and the adjectives they modify in a bi-directional fashion. It is claimed that only a cognitive and usage-based approach in terms of underlying conceptual structures can provide an accurate description of collocational patterns. The results show that a large proportion of the adjectives have strong bonds with particular maximizers. This is explained through the basic conceptual structure of Boundedness/Scalarity, i.e. the degree to which the adjective lends itself to a bounded or a scalar construal and the adverb is biased towards a totality construal (which is the kind of construal to be expected from maximizers). The results support the hypothesis that a substantial part of the adverb-adjective combinations investigated are (semi)-prefabricated units, presumably easily accessed by native speakers because the combinations are the result of specific construals and their members have close associative and conceptual links in the mental lexicon.