Abstract
Discourse-pragmatic variation has until recently tended to be left out of the field of variationist sociolinguistics, where studies of phonological and morphosyntactic features have traditionally overshadowed an area that remained undefined. This volume breaks new ground in that respect, placing discourse-pragmatic features in the spotlight. A stimulating volume that gathers eleven chapters (including the epilogue), Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change in English, edited by Heike Pichler, provides new perspectives, models, and future directions for the development of this field, which make it an invaluable source for both “informed” readers and for researchers new to this area.
The aim of the volume, as indicated by the editor in the introductory chapter, is twofold: first to present a range of new methods for the study of discourse-pragmatic variation and change and second to provide new empirical and theoretical insights into the complex sociolinguistic dimensions of discourse-pragmatic variation and change in English. As Pichler argues, using a label like discourse-pragmatic variation allows for the inclusion of formally, functionally, and syntactically heterogeneous features (from well-researched variables to less prototypical features), which very clearly reflects the growth of research in the field (Aijmer & Simon-Vandenbergen 2011:223). Thus, the reader is treated to not only a well-orchestrated description of methods, research aims, and thought-provoking analyses, but to a variety of features such as interjections, vocatives, question tags, utterance-final tags, intensifiers, and response elicitors, as well as other well-researched features such as adverb-like variables, quotatives, discourse like, or vague category markers.
Evident throughout the volume is the demonstration of how the use of different methods and techniques and the combination of different approaches and perspectives can help us better understand discourse-pragmatic variation and change. The volume is divided into four sections: “Methods,” “Innovations,” “Change,” and “Variation.”
In section I (“Methods”), Gisle Andersen first draws attention to how corpus-driven and corpus-based methods complement each other. He then proceeds to demonstrate how a corpus-driven comparison of corpora can help researchers identify features which might have gone unnoticed. In order to carry out a diachronic study of language change he takes the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), collected in 1993, and compares findings with two other corpora: the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LIC) and Multicultural London English (MLE), both collected in 2005-2008. Focusing on the identification of discourse-pragmatic innovations, an analysis of up to five-word clusters allows him to show how “hermeneutical judgements, linguistic knowledge and intuitions” (32) are still necessary in corpus linguistic studies. His analysis leads him to a set of candidates for discourse-pragmatic change or innovation including interjections (duh), vocatives (bruv, blud), text-organizing discourse markers (at the end of the day), and response-elicitors (you get what I’m saying). In the second chapter devoted to methods, Cathleen Waters advocates for flexibility in the treatment of the linguistic variable, an essential notion within the area of socio-pragmatic variation. Following a reflection on the principle of accountability (Labov 1972), she warns the reader that “although normalised frequencies allow some means of comparison across studies undertaken with different methodologies, and thus may be useful as a starting point, they are insufficient in quantitative analyses for fully elucidating variation in context” (44). Her examination of actually as a discourse-pragmatic feature demonstrates the advantages that a broad understanding of the variable context, taking into account discourse-pragmatic functions and positional characteristics, can have in the study of adverb-like discourse-pragmatic features.
In section II (“Innovations”), Heike Pichler focuses on the uses of innit in the context of multicultural London English. Like Andersen, she uses the LIC, but while his chapter focuses on forms, Pichler’s is concerned with identifying innovative uses of forms that are well-established. By taking a close look at position, social scope, and function, she is able to detect innovation in relation to the interactional use and positional mobility of innit, thus questioning some of the claims made by Torgersen et al. (2011) and Palacios Martínez (2015), who base their interpretations exclusively on frequency. Pichler’s study, like Derek Denis and Sali Tagliamonte’s in the following chapter, provides replicable quantitative methods that can be used to trace the trajectory of tags in general. In their chapter, Denis and Tagliamonte focus on utterance-final tags, showing a rise in frequency that affects right across apparent-time in Toronto English. Their study reveals evident generational trends in the use of right, which appears to be taking over from you know, and it shows a male tendency towards dissociation from a change that they initially led. They suggest lexical replacement as a general mechanism of discourse-pragmatic change.
Discourse-pragmatic change is precisely the focus of section III, which contains three chapters. The first chapter, by Tagliamonte, is devoted to general extenders (GEs), or vague category markers (e.g., and stuff, or something like that, and things), and it uses material from the author’s Roots Archive (Tagliamonte 2013), which contains data from the North of England, south-west Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Tagliamonte’s results show that contrary to the claim that the GE system is undergoing grammaticalization, no evidence of this is found in her study. The second chapter, by Celeste Rodríguez-Louro, is a longitudinal treatment of quotatives in Australian English, where the quotative system, the author points out, has been in flux for quite some time. A multivariate analysis of spontaneous narratives collected between 1963 and 2011 leads the author to the conclusion that say is progressively being replaced by other quotatives such as think, go, be like and quotative deletion, and that the rise of be like is inextricably connected with the rise of internal thought-encoding (i.e., reporting inner thoughts or feelings) across time. Also focusing on quotative be like and its acquisition by children, the last chapter in this section tracks discourse-pragmatic change in the speech of young speakers in Ottawa. By combining methods of analysis, Stephen Levey concludes that unlike other areas of spoken discourse, such as phonology, the acquisition of discourse-pragmatic features extends well into later childhood.
Section IV on “Variation” opens with a chapter by Robert Fuchs and Ulrike Gut on intensifiers across Asian Englishes, based on the Indian, Singapore, Philippine, and British sub-corpora of the International Corpus of English (ICE). Fuchs and Gut’s study uses cluster analysis and phenograms, a phylogenetic method that allows them to visualize register- and variety-specific patterns in intensifier usage (e.g., really, very, extremely, etc.) across all four varieties of English. They also conclude that different patterns of intensifier use have developed in Asian varieties, which is interesting in the context of Kachru’s (1985) outer-circle varieties of English. The second chapter in this section applies new methods for quantifying the distribution of GEs. In it, Suzanne Evans Wagner et al. examine the differences of GE functions in familiar versus non-familiar registers as well as vernacular narratives versus other non-narrative styles. They show that frequency-based studies of these features carried out so far have failed to account for how speakers employ different GEs functionally. Their study combines the frequency-based approach with an innovative function-based analysis of GEs. In the last chapter, Katie Drager uses data from an ethnographic study of an all girls’ high school in New Zealand in order to put to the test whether the production of discourse-pragmatic like in this context was or was not connected with the speaker’s stance-taking and constructed style(s). Her results show that the informants manipulated their realizations of like to construct their stances and styles.
The volume closes with an epilogue where Jenny Cheshire singles out four areas of special interest to her, arising from the volume, namely, discourse-pragmatic features and language change, positional movement and innovation, the acquisition of discourse-pragmatic variation, and the social meaning of discourse-pragmatic features. In her final reflection she places a question mark over the appropriateness of taking the concept of the variable as a measuring cup for the study of all types of discourse-pragmatic variation, and suggests dividing the area into smaller categories. Cheshire’s epilogue is a most-welcome addition to the volume, not only because it establishes a fruitful dialogue with the rest of the chapters, engaging critically with them, and underlining the significance of some of the findings and methods reported therein (particularly the Denis and Tagliamonte, Pichler, Levey, and Drager chapters), but also because it usefully points to new directions for investigation which can be of great use to future researchers in languages other than English.
Overall the book and its sections are tightly arranged. Edited books do not come to fruition by themselves, and the scope and quality of the chapters in this volume owes a great deal to its editor too. The only difficulty I found with some of the chapters was with terminology that seems itself locked in a written, sentence-based perspective on language, despite the fact that all the chapters are based on spoken data. Reference to “left-dislocated” elements or “right dislocation” is a common tendency in studies dealing with features of spoken discourse, which ironically seem to employ a metalanguage that is page-driven. This has been criticized by McCarthy (1998:62), who points out that metaphors of dislocation have a tendency to suggest that something is “wrong” or “out of place,” rather than perfectly normal, acceptable, and significant in conversational terms. As McCarthy puts it, “[d]iscourse drives grammar, not the reverse” (1998:78). These observations are most certainly worthy of attention, although in the context of the volume at hand I think they add to the theoretical discussion of the topic, and are more enriching than critical.
The chapters represent a good cross-section of the work being done on discourse-pragmatic variation (albeit, of course, not an exhaustive compilation). When I started looking at discourse features in the context of Irish English about twenty years ago, a volume like this would have been a great place to start reading about discourse-pragmatic variation, so we should be grateful both to the editor and the authors for this important, useful, and valuable contribution to the literature. As Chesire’s epilogue emphasizes, the volume contains a wide array of ideas, “and the care with which the contributors have outlined their methods makes it possible for future researchers to replicate their studies and in this way to advance our understanding of this essential yet rather neglected aspect of language” (266). For scholars already in the field and particularly postgraduate students, this book will become a touchstone.
