The expression of stance is one of the crucial aspects in the development of several language forms, which over time tend to undergo not only grammaticisation, but also pragmaticisation, i.e. they tend to be used precisely with the aim of adding to the meta-communicative level that goes beyond the conveying of a content.
Variational pragmatics is among the youngest branches of pragmatics, and it studies the different pragmatic values of items across varieties, or the different realisations of the same pragmatic function across varieties through different forms. Studies on stance-taking, and on pragmatically sensitive items in general, has recently started to include both native and non-native varieties of English, also thanks to the increased availability of computerised material.
The workshop will look at discourse and pragmatic markers across web texts in different Englishes (the GloWbE corpus will be used), starting from the observation that discourse markers (showing a range of stance-expressing functions) appear with widely diverging frequencies across the corpus, which could point to a prevalence, in different varieties of English, of different pragmatic strategies.
After an introduction on variational pragmatics and discourse markers, as well as the presentation of previous results in this line of research, students will perform their own mini-searches and individual results will be discussed in a pragmatic perspective
Source:
GloWbE = Corpus of global web-based English, Brigham Young University. http://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/
