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Discourse Markers as Indicators of Register
Abstract
The speech of twenty Spanish-English bilingual children, aged six to ten, was recorded while the children engaged in pretend play with puppets in Spanish. The puppets represented a variety of characters with different social relationships. Analyses focused on the distribution of discourse markers (DMs) across the different roles played. Results indicate that these children use DMs to specifically mark differences in status and in familiarity/intimacy between interlocutors: High-status roles (parents, teachers) reveal greater use of DMs than lower-status roles (children), and this difference increases when familiarity decreases (i.e., more DMs by teacher in the classroom setting than by parent in the family setting). Finer differences among DMs are also demonstrated, and the relationship between DMs and particular speech acts is explored. The findings are discussed in the context of prior research on the acquisition of register knowledge in English and in French.
... Consider for instance a corpus of medical terms derived from various literatures, representing scientific, practice, and consumer health. The topics are the same across groups and language register naturally varies by group, as discourse markers and long evidenced in corpora studies (Brizuela, Andersen, & Stallings, 1999;Chiu, 1972;Wynne, 2005) and the lexicography of professional practice (Kennedy, 1987;McCrae et al., 2012;David and Gardner (2013). Such studies show how terms are distributed differently based on largelevel sociolinguistic and practice domains, such as "Science", "Social Science", "Humanities" (Arazy & Woo, 2007;Hyland & Tse, 2007;Prieto Valesco, 2013;Witt, Heid, Sasaki, & Sérasset, 2009). ...
Keeping informed given rapid trend in data and resources about covid-19 is a new challenge. Different user groups (researchers/doctors, practitioners, public) vary in linguistic expression and vocabulary so a new retrieval framework might likewise vary to improve retrieval, expose unanticipated concepts, and establish a sustainable research stream. In this project a document collection about covid-19 was created, parsed according to ISO12620's definition of linguistic register, and retrieval sets compared. Results suggest trends from other fields parallel register-oriented criteria; project exposes unexpected concepts across groups, uses of visualization, and warrants ling-register as a sustainable IR research stream.
... However, despite their long tradition of study, one aspect of DMs that is of particular interest in the context of this volume has remained relatively unexplored: the fact that individual DMs can be combined with others in two-part and sometimes even longer sequences, e.g., oh well or like you know I mean in English. This phenomenon has been termed DM clustering (e.g., Maschler 1994), stacking (e.g., Brizuela et al. 1999), or sequencing (e.g., Fraser 2009, our preferred The sequencing of DMs is occasionally mentioned in studies on individual DMs, but usually as a secondary consideration. It has received only very limited attention as a theoretically relevant phenomenon in its own right. ...
... As a bracket announcing the beginning of a new phase of discursive activity, alright points to a person who is sufficiently in control of the situation to be able to determine the activity for all conversational participants. As a number of classroom researchers have shown, teachers frequently use discourse markers such as "alright," "okay," "well," and "now" to indicate a change of the phase of activity that also indexes a heightened authority in that context (e.g., Brizuela, Andersen, and Stallings 1999;Coulthard 1985;Lemke 1990). ...
Labeling theory has long held a rather significant place in sociology generally, and in symbolic interaction more specifically. Yet, in its long history, labeling theorists have seldom considered how interactional contexts mediate the effective application of labels. Similarly, labeling theory, with its focus on deviance, has largely neglected positive instances of labeling. In this article, I consider an instance of labeling in a tutoring session and show how the local interactional context of the application of a label is accomplished such that the label “smarter than you think” is made to stick to the student. In doing so, I demonstrate how labeling theory can be productively extended to consider positive labeling as well as the interactional contexts that mediate these labeling processes. In closing, I propose that this approach could help develop labeling theory into a complex and nuanced theory of the social constitution of human behavior.
... Another common language stereotype, propagated widely by Payne (2005), is that children from generational poverty primarily speak with an "informal" register or style (as one might speak with a sibling or close friend) while their middle class and wealthier counterparts speak with a "formal" register (as one might speak during a job interview). However, like other forms of codeswitching-modifying behavior in context-specific ways-all people use a full continuum of language registers (Brizuela, Andersen, & Stallings, 1999), regardless of the variety of language they speak. The false association, for instance, of Appalachian English with informal register demonstrates a mistaken conflation of "formal" with what we call "standard" English. ...
A rich history of scholarship has demonstrated the ways in which popular stereotypes of disenfranchised communities, including people living in poverty, affect individual biases and preconceptions. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which such stereotypes help frame policy and practice responses regarding social problems, such as the economic “achievement gap.” The purpose of this essay is to examine the nature of poverty-based stereotyping in the context of popular discourses regarding the education of poor and low-income students. In doing so, I analyze stereotypes commonly used to locate the problem of the economic “achievement gap” as existing within, rather than as pressing upon, poor and low-income families. I then discuss how these stereotypes have fed deficit ideology and, as a result, misdirected policy and practice responses to gross class inequities in U.S. schools.
Where does common ground come from? When do infants and young children start to make use of common ground as they communicate? How do they assess what their interlocutor knows? And how do they mark information as given (in common ground) vs. new (to be added to common ground)? These are some of the questions addressed in the present chapter. Common ground, I suggest, originates in infants' everyday settings and routines where they can rely on caregivers' knowledge. Common ground depends from the first on joint attention, physical co-presence, and conversational co-presence, so it is intrinsic to communication from the start. But children have to learn how to indicate linguistically that information is given or new, how to assess what their addressees do and don't know on each occasion, and how to design utterances based on such assessments.
WHEN TAKEN SEPARATELY, linguistic studies on Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) and those involving pragmatics and discourse analysis represent two research trends that have both flourished during the past two or three decades. It is somewhat surprising, then, that when considered together, the body of research in pragmatics/discourse that incorporates SHL is still in the developing stages. One explanation for this may simply be a matter of time, because relatively speaking these are both young areas of enquiry that do not belong to long-standing research traditions. The same could be said for research on SHL, which did not fully come into its own until the 1980s and 1990s. Another contributing factor could be that the interdisciplinary fields of pragmatics/discourse cover such a vast range of topics and theoretical perspectives that no single line of research on SHL has been particularly prominent. Taking into consideration this disparateness, in order to locate a homogeneous focus among diverse areas of research that are often only loosely interrelated, this chapter only addresses pragmatic/discourse issues linked to how heritage speakers (HS) in the United States use Spanish in oral interaction.
Although some identify Spanish eh as a discourse marker, it has not been thoroughly described in terms of characteristics ascribed to discourse markers. Using a framework of discourse marker characteristics, I investigated 924 examples of eh in Dominican Spanish. Results show that eh in Dominican Spanish is not a part of the syntactic structure, has the functions of other discourse markers, possesses deictic properties, occurs in the same positions as other discourse markers, and co-occurs with discourse markers in predictable ways. We find that eh has both the prototypical function of marking hesitation as well as a peripheral function of marking reformulation. Patterns in the co-occurrence of eh with other discourse markers are also found. A multivariate analysis is performed and shows that eh occurs more among the higher class, men, and the older-aged in Santiago, Dominican Republic. Eh is also found to share many similarities with the English uh or um. The work concludes that eh should be considered as a discourse marker like those in Spanish and other languages (e.g. English like, French genre, and Spanish o sea, bueno, quiero decir, etc.). These findings have application to research in discourse markers, language pathologies, computer modeling of spontaneous speech, and second language acquisition.
There have been few comprehensive analyses of register variation conducted in a European language other than English. Spanish provides an ideal test case for such a study: Spanish is a major international language with a long social history of literacy, and it is a Romance language, with interesting linguistic similarities to, and differences from, English. The present study uses Multi-Dimensional (MD) analysis to investigate the distribution of a large set of linguistic features in a wide range of spoken and written registers: 146 linguistic features in a twenty-million words corpus taken from nineteen spoken and written registers. Six primary dimensions of variation are identified and interpreted in linguistic and functional terms. Some of these dimensions are specialised, without obvious counterparts in the MD analyses of other languages (e.g., a dimension related to discourse with a counterfactual focus). However, other Spanish dimensions correspond closely to dimensions identified for other languages, reflecting functional considerations such as interactiveness, personal stance, informational density, argumentation, and a narrative focus.
This study examines bilingual discourse markers in a language
contact situation. The focus is on how English-dominant, bilingual,
and Spanish-dominant New York Puerto Ricans integrate
English-language discourse markers into their Spanish-language
oral narratives. The corpus comprises 60 Spanish-language oral
narratives of personal experience extracted from transcripts
of conversations with New York Puerto Ricans. After a review
of the study of discourse markers in language contact situations,
the use of English-language discourse markers is compared to
the use of Spanish-language markers in the texts. The discussion
considers the question of whether English-language discourse
markers are more profitably identified as instances of
code-switching or of borrowing. Finally, the essay explores
how bilingual speakers integrate English discourse markers in
their narratives with a pattern of usage and frequency that
varies according to language proficiency.
Studies of discourse markers in United States SpanishAnother approach to the study of discourse markersDiscourse markers, register, and heritage language SpanishNew DirectionsReferences
The aim of this study was to determine the extent to which the linguistic forms used by adolescents in electronic mail (e-mail) differ from those used in standard written language. The study was conducted in French, a language with a deep orthography that has strict, addressee-dependent rules for using second person personal pronouns (unfamiliar and familiar forms). Data were collected from 80 adolescents ages 12 to 15 in a natural situation where they had to introduce themselves by e-mail to two addressees (peer/teacher). Participants were divided into two groups (skilled/unskilled in computer-mediated communication). Their emails contained a large number of orthographic deviations (the most frequent being neographic forms). Participants skilled in computer-mediated communication (CMC) deviated more than unskilled ones did. The number of orthographic deviations was not linked to the participants' standard writing ability. The personal-pronoun data clearly showed that adolescents used the familiar form of 'you' (tu) to address the peer and the unfamiliar form (vous) to address the teacher. We conclude that, for adolescents, e-mail constitutes a distinct written-language register. Nevertheless, the e-mail register seems to follow the pragmatic rules of standard spoken and written interaction.
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