The Use of Wait as a Discourse-Pragmatic Marker in Spoken British English

A Corpus-Based Analysis

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17561/grove.v29.7268

Keywords:

Discourse-pragmatic Marker, Speech, Wait as a Discourse-pragmatic Marker, Canadian Context, British Context, Corpus-based Study

Abstract

Discourse-pragmatic markers—DPMs—have attracted much scholarly attention over the years since they play an important role in our daily lives. Most of them have been analysed by scholars. However, in this paper, I focus on one of these units, wait, a DPM which, with the exception of Tagliamonte (Wait, It’s a Discourse Marker) in the Canadian context, has been largely neglected. I follow a corpus-based approach, examining data from spoken British English extracted from the BNC2014. The study offers new light on the uses and functions of this DPM in the British English context and allows a comparison with the Canadian English data examined by Tagliamonte (Wait, It’s a Discourse Marker).

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Author Biography

Nazaret Camacho Salas, University of Seville

Nazaret Camacho Salas owns a degree in English Studies from University of Seville (US). Currently, she is studying for a Master's degree. She has participated for two years in the Internal Student programme (discussing pragmatic issues) in the US. She is really into pragmatic and linguistic fields of the English language. In fact, the interest of her research deals with pragmatic linguistics, especially discourse-pragmatic markers in British English.

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Published

2022-12-23

How to Cite

Camacho Salas, N. (2022). The Use of Wait as a Discourse-Pragmatic Marker in Spoken British English: A Corpus-Based Analysis. The Grove - Working Papers on English Studies, 29, 31–55. https://doi.org/10.17561/grove.v29.7268