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Like in Discourse Marker Combinations in Spoken Interaction

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Abstract

An often cited property of discourse markers is their ability to cluster. Precisely this property has so far received little dedicated scholarly attention, including for a marker as ubiquitous in spoken English as like. This paper, therefore, investigates like’s clustering behaviour in peer-to-peer interactions of native speakers of English. In total, 516 like clusters were identified in our corpus. In the overwhelming majority of these clusters the two markers share scope over the same (part of the) utterance while maintaining their distinctive functions. The most frequent markers like combines with in such Addition clusters are and, but, so, because/cos’ and just. These clusters adhere to an almost invariant ordering pattern, in which the other markers nearly exclusively precede like. A functional analysis of all clusters involving these five markers demonstrates that like may mirror the function of the preceding marker, act as a marker of elaboration or as a downtoner, and appears to reflect the speaker’s desire to present an account with a more engaging tone. The findings for like provide further support for the hypothesis that in clusters discourse markers maintain their functional independence but are syntactically constrained. Some specific uses, however, may hold the potential to evolve into more fixed combinations.

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Availability of data and materials

The corpus is currently considered private property of the KU Leuven’s MIDI research group. The data has not yet been published on a public platform as it was collected for Meaghan Blanchard’s dissertation which has not yet been published.

Code availability

All analysis was done with ELAN/ExMaralda, which are free resources online. There is no code.

Notes

  1. Following Aijmer and Simon-Vandenbergen (2011: 10), the term discourse marker is considered here as a subset of pragmatic markers. The latter is a blanket term that includes filled pauses, modal particles, interjections, feedback signals, disjuncts, pragmatic uses of conjunctions, hedges, etc.

  2. Co-occurrences, combinations and clusters are all taken to refer to the same phenomenon of two or more DMs occurring together.

  3. Transcription conventions: Full stops are used to indicate pauses rather than clause boundaries (. =short pause; .. =medium pause; … =long pause). Speakers are identified by an anonymous tag (NS#). Overlap is indicated with the parenthesis (overlap) before both speakers’ speech in which the overlap occurred. Stuttering or repetition of a word is marked with =.

  4. Note that the quotative use of like has not always been included in analyses of the marker, because in this context it is a part of a fixed structure (‘X BE like’) and it is not syntactically optional. The quotative use is, however, clearly strongly related to the “pure” DM use since it also signals looseness and approximation and acts as a discourse frame, and it matches Crible’s (2018) definition of DMs (see Section “Introduction”). We will, therefore, follow a.o. Müller (2005) and Beeching (2016) and include it in our analysis.

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Funding

Funds were provided by the KU Leuven.

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  1. KU Leuven, Brussels, Belgium

    Meaghan Blanchard & Lieven Buysse

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  1. Meaghan Blanchard
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  2. Lieven Buysse
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Correspondence to Meaghan Blanchard.

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Approval was obtained from the ethics committee of KU Leuven and UWE Bristol. The procedures used in this study adhere to the tenets of the Belgian national ethical code drawn up by the four Belgian Academies—the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, the (Flemish) Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine, and the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity, drawn up by ALLEA (All European Academies).

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Blanchard, M., Buysse, L. Like in Discourse Marker Combinations in Spoken Interaction. Corpus Pragmatics 5, 463–485 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-021-00105-4

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