Methods in discourse variation analysis: Reflections on the way forward

Journal of Sociolinguistics

Volumn 14, Issue 5, 2010, Pages 581-608

  Pichler, Heike ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SALFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Discourse markers; Discourse variables; Discourse variation and change; Generalizability; Variationist methodology

Indexed keywords

EID: 78649602893     PISSN: 13606441     EISSN: 14679841     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2010.00455.x     Document Type: Article

References (97)

1. Aijmer, Karin. 2002. English Discourse Particles: Evidence from a Corpus. Amsterdam, The Netherlands John Benjamins.
2. Andersen, Gisle. 2001. Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to the Language of Adolescents. Amsterdam, The Netherlands John Benjamins.
3. Bailey, Guy and Jan Tillery 2004. Some sources of divergent data in sociolinguistics. In Carmen Fought (ed.) Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections. Oxford, U.K. Oxford University Press. 11-30.
4. Bayley, Robert. 2002. The quantitative paradigm. In J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.) The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Oxford, U.K. Blackwell. 117-141.
5. Bazzanella, Carla. 2006. Discourse markers in Italian: Towards a 'compositional' meaning. In Kerstin Fischer (ed.) Approaches to Discourse Particles. Amsterdam, The Netherlands Elsevier. 449-464.
6. Blakemore, Diane. 1988. So as a constraint on relevance. In Ruth M. Kempson (ed.) Mental Representations: The Interface between Language and Reality. Cambridge, U.K. Cambridge University Press. 183-195.
7. Brinton, Laurel J. 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Function. Berlin, Germany Mouton de Gruyter.
8. Brinton, Laurel J. 2006. Pathways in the development of pragmatic markers in English. In Hans Van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.) The Handbook of the History of English. Oxford, U.K. Blackwell. 307-334.
9. Buchstaller, Isabelle. 2004. The sociolinguistic constraints on the quotative system - British English and U.S. English compared. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Edinburgh, U.K .: University of Edinburgh .
10. Buchstaller, Isabelle. 2006. Diagnostics of age-graded linguistic behaviour: The case of the quotative system. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10: 3-30.
11. Buchstaller, Isabelle. 2009. The quantitative analysis of morpho-syntactic variation: Constructing and quantifying the denominator. Language and Linguistics Compass 3: 1010-1033.
12. Buchstaller, Isabelle and Alexandra D'Arcy 2009. Localized globalization: A multi-local, multivariate investigation of quotative be like. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13: 291-331.
13. Cameron, Deborah, Fiona McAlinden and Kathy O'Leary 1988. Lakoff in context: The social and linguistic functions of tag questions. In Jennifer Coates and Deborah Cameron (eds.) Women in their Speech Communities: New Perspectives on Language and Sex. London Longman. 74-93.
14. Cheshire, Jenny. 1981. Variation in the use of ain't in an urban British English dialect. Language in Society 10: 365-381.
15. Cheshire, Jenny. 1987. Syntactic variation, the linguistic variable, and sociolinguistic theory. Linguistics 25: 257-282.
16. Cheshire, Jenny. 2007. Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11: 155-193.
17. Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill and Anne Williams 2005. Phonology, grammar and discourse in dialect convergence. In Peter Auer, Frans Hinskens and Paul Kerswill (eds.) Dialect Change: Convergence and Divergence in European Languages. Cambridge, U.K. Cambridge University Press. 135-167.
18. Coates, Jennifer. 1987. Epistemic modality and spoken discourse. Transactions of the Philological Society 85: 110-131.
19. Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge, U.K. Cambridge University Press.
20. D'Arcy, Alexandra. 2005. Like: Syntax and development. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Toronto, Canada University of Toronto.
21. Diewald, Gabriele. 2006. Discourse particles and modal particles as grammatical elements. In Kerstin Fischer (ed.) Approaches to Discourse Particles. Amsterdam, The Netherlands Elsevier. 406-426.
22. Dines, Elizabeth. 1980. Variation in discourse -'and stuff like that'. Language in Society 9: 13-31.
23. Dubois, Betty L. and Isabel Crouch 1975. The question of tag questions in women's speech: They don't really use more of them, do they? Language in Society 4: 289-294.
24. Dubois, Sylvie. 1992. Extension particles, etc. Language Variation and Change 4: 179-203.
25. Eckert, Penelope. 2001. Style and social meaning. In Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford (eds.) Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, U.K. Cambridge University Press. 119-126.
26. Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-Ginet 1992. Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community-based practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 461-490.
27. Erman, Britt. 1992. Female and male usage of pragmatic expressions in same-gender and mixed-gender interaction. Language Variation and Change 4: 217-234.
28. Erman, Britt. 2001. Pragmatic markers revisited with a focus on you know in adult and adolescent talk. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1337-1359.
29. Escalera, Elena A. 2009. Gender differences in children's use of discourse markers: Separate worlds or different contexts? Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1887-1907.
30. Ferrara, Kathleen W. 1997. Form and function of the discourse marker anyway: Implications for discourse analysis. Linguistics 35: 343-378.
31. Ferrara, Kathleen and Barbara Bell 1995. Sociolinguistic variation and discourse function of constructed dialogue introducers: The case of be + like. American Speech 70: 265-290.
32. Fischer, Kerstin. 2000. Discourse particles, turn-taking, and the semantics-pragmatics interface. Revue de Sémantique et Pragmatique 8: 111-137.
33. Fischer, Kerstin. 2006. Towards an understanding of the spectrum of approaches to discourse particles: Introduction to the volume. In Kerstin Fischer (ed.) Approaches to Discourse Particles. Amsterdam, The Netherlands Elsevier. 1-20.
34. Fraser, Bruce. 1996. Pragmatic markers. Pragmatics 6: 167-190.
35. Freed, Alice F. and Alice Greenwood 1996. Women, men, and type of talk: What makes the difference? Language in Society 25: 1-26.
36. Fuller, Janet M. 2003. The influence of speaker roles on discourse marker use. Journal of Pragmatics 35: 23-45.
37. Gisborne, Nikolas and Graeme Trousdale 2008. Constructional approaches to language-particular description. In Graeme Trousdale and Nikolas Grisborne (eds.) Constructional Approaches to English Grammar. Berlin, Germany Mouton de Gruyter. 1-4.
38. Guy, Gregory R. 1974. Variation in the group and the individual: The case of final stop deletion. Pennsylvania Working Papers on Linguistic Change and Variation 1: 1-75.
39. Hackert, Stephanie. 2008. Counting and coding the past: Circumscribing the variable context in quantitative analyses of past inflection. Language Variation and Change 20: 127-153.
40. Holmes, Janet. 1982. The functions of tag questions. English Language Research Journal 4: 40-65.
41. Holmes, Janet. 1984. Hedging your bets and sitting on the fence: Some evidence for hedges as support structures. Te Reo 27: 47-62.
42. Holmes, Janet. 1995. Women, Men and Politeness. London, U.K. Longman.
43. Ito, Rika and Sali Tagliamonte 2003. Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: Layering and recycling in English intensifiers. Language in Society 32: 257-279.
44. Johnson, Daniel Ezra. 2009. Getting off the GoldVarb standard. Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass 3: 359-383.
45. Jucker, Andreas H. 1993. The discourse marker well: A relevance-theoretical account. Journal of Pragmatics 19: 435-452.
46. Kallen, Jeffrey and John Kirk 2007. ICE-Ireland: Local variations on global standards. In Joan C. Beal, Karen P. Corrigan and Hermann L. Moisl (eds.) Creating and Digitizing Corpora. Vol. 1: Synchronic Databases. Basingstoke, U.K. Palgrave Macmillan. 121-162.
47. Kjellmer, Göran. 2003. Hesitation: In defence of er and erm. English Studies 2: 170-198.
48. Labov, William. 1963. The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19: 273-309.
49. Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D.C. Centre for Applied Linguistics.
50. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Oxford, U.K. Blackwell.
51. Labov, William. 1998. The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change. In Jenny Cheshire and Peter Trudgill (eds.) The Sociolinguistics Reader. Vol. 2: Gender and Discourse. Oxford, U.K. Oxford University Press. 7-52.
52. Lam, Phoenix W. Y. 2009. The effect of text type on the use of so as a discourse particle. Discourse Studies 11: 353-372.
53. Lavandera, Beatriz R. 1978. Where does the sociolinguistic variable stop? Language in Society 7: 171-182.
54. Lenk, Uta. 1998. Marking Discourse Coherence: Functions of Discourse Markers in Spoken English. Tübingen, Germany Gunter Narr.
55. Macaulay, Ronald. 2001. You're like'why not?' The quotative expressions of Glasgow adolescents. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5: 3-21.
56. Macaulay, Ronald. 2002a. Discourse variation. In J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.) The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Oxford, U.K. Blackwell. 283-305.
57. Macaulay, Ronald. 2002b. Extremely interesting, very interesting, or only quite interesting? Adverbs and social class. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6: 398-417.
58. Macaulay, Ronald. 2005. Talk That Counts: Age, Gender, and Social Class Differences in Discourse. Oxford, U.K. Oxford University Press.
59. Macaulay, Ronald. 2006. Pure grammaticalization: The development of a teenage intensifier. Language Variation and Change 18: 267-283.
60. Mauranen, Anna. 2004. 'They're a little bit different'-...-: Observations on hedges in academic talk. In Karin Aijmer (ed.) Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora. Amsterdam, The Netherlands John Benjamins. 173-197.
61. Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2007. Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs. Oxford, U.K. Wiley-Blackwell.
62. Meyerhoff, Miriam. 1994. Sounds pretty ethnic, eh?: A pragmatic particle in New Zealand English. Language in Society 23: 367-388.
63. Moore, Emma and Robert Podesva 2009. Style, indexicality, and the social meaning of tag questions. Language in Society 38: 447-485.
64. Overstreet, Maryann. 1999. Whales, Candlelight, and Stuff like That. Oxford, U.K. Oxford University Press.
65. Pichler, Heike. 2008. A qualitative-quantitative study of negative auxiliaries in a northern English dialect: i don't know and i don't think, innit? Unpublished PhD dissertation. Aberdeen, U.K. University of Aberdeen.
66. Pichler, Heike. 2009. The functional and social reality of discourse variants in a northern English dialect: i don't know and i don't think compared. Intercultural Pragmatics 6: 561-596.
67. Pichler, Heike and Stephen Levey Accepted, subject to revisions. A variationist perspective on the grammaticalization of general extenders in north-east England. English Language and Linguistics.
68. Preston, Dennis R. 1991. Sorting out the variables in sociolinguistic theory. American Speech 66: 33-56.
69. Rampton, Ben. 1995. Crossing. London, U.K. Longman.
70. Rickford, John, Isabelle Buchstaller, Thomas Warsow and Arnold Zwicky 2007. Intensive and quotative all: Something old, something new. American Speech 82: 3-31.
71. Romaine, Suzanne. 1984. On the problem of syntactic variation and pragmatic meaning in sociolinguistic theory. Folia Linguistica 18: 409-437.
72. Romaine, Suzanne and Deborah Lange 1991. The use of like as a marker of reported speech and thought: A case of grammaticalization in progress. American Speech 66: 227-279.
73. Romero-Trillo, Jesus. 2006. Discourse markers. In Keith Brown (ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edition). Amsterdam, The Netherlands Elsevier. 639-642.
74. Sankoff, Gillian. 1973. Above and beyond phonology in variable rules. In Charles-James N. Bailey and Roger W. Shuy (eds.) New Ways of Analysing Variation in English. Washington, D.C. Georgetown University Press. 44-61.
75. Sankoff, David, Sali A. Tagliamonte and E. Smith 2005. Goldvarb X: A Multivariate Analysis Application. Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto, and Department of Mathematics, University of Ottawa .
76. Schegloff, Emanuel. 1993. Reflections on quantification in the study of conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 26: 99-128.
77. Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge, U.K. Cambridge University Press.
78. Schleef, Erik. 2008. The 'lecturer's OK' revisited: Changing discourse conventions and the influence of academic division. American Speech 83: 62-84.
79. Schwenter, Scott and Rena Torres Cacoullos 2008. Defaults and indeterminacy in temporal grammaticalization: The 'perfect' road to perfectives. Language Variation and Change 20: 1-39.
80. Serrano, Maria José. Forthcoming. Morphosyntactic variation in Spain. In Manuel Diáz Campos (ed.) The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics. Oxford, U.K. Blackwell. 188-204.
81. Siegel, Muffy. 2002. 'Like': The discourse particle and semantics. Journal of Semantics 19: 35-71.
82. Stenström, Anna-Brita. 1998. From sentence to discourse: Cos (because) in teenage talk. In Andres H. Jucker and Yael Ziv (eds.) Discourse Markers: Descriptions and Theory. Amsterdam, The Netherlands John Benjamins. 127-146.
83. Stubbe, Maria and Janet Holmes 1995. You know, eh and other exasperating expressions: An analysis of social and stylistic variation in the use of pragmatic particles in a sample of New Zealand English. Language and Communication 15: 63-88.
84. Tagliamonte, Sali. 2002. Comparative sociolinguistics. In J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.) The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Oxford, U.K. Blackwell. 729-763.
85. Tagliamonte, Sali. 2005. So who?Like how?Just what? Discourse markers in the conversations of young Canadians. Journal of Pragmatics 37: 1896-1915.
86. Tagliamonte, Sali. 2006. Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, U.K. Cambridge University Press.
87. Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Derek Denis Forthcoming. The stuff of change: General extenders in Toronto, Canada. Journal of English Linguistics.
88. Tagliamonte, Sali and Rachel Hudson 1999. Be like et al. beyond America: The quotative system in British and Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3: 147-172.
89. Terraschke, Agnes. 2007. Use of general extenders by German non-native speakers of English. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 45: 141-160.
90. Torres Cacoullos, Rena. 2001. From lexical to grammatical to social meaning. Language in Society 30: 443-478.
91. Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1995. The role of the development of discourse markers in a theory of grammaticalization. Paper presented at ICHL XII, 17 August, Manchester Last accessed 27 February 2008 at
92. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2001. Zeroing in on multifunctionality and style. In Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford (eds.) Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, U.K. Cambridge University Press. 127-136.
93. Trester, Anna Marie. 2009. Discourse marker 'oh' as a means for realizing the identity potential of constructed dialogue in interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13: 147-168.
94. Tsui, Amy B. M. 1991. The pragmatic functions of I don't know. Text 11: 607-622.
95. Vincent, Diane and David Sankoff 1993. Punctors: A pragmatic variable. Language Variation and Change 4: 205-216.
96. Walker, James A. 2010. Variation in Linguistic Systems. London, U.K. Routledge.
97. Waters, Cathleen. 2009. Transatlantic divergence: The social and linguistic correlates of actually/really variation. Paper presented at NWAV 38, 24 October, Ottawa, Canada .