Description: The multifunctionality of pragmatic markers makes it difficult to describe their meaning and functional potential. For example we know very little about pragmatic markers and prosody, their sociolinguistic use (how they are related to the speaker's social class, age or gender) or their distribution across text types (informal conversation, discussion, broadcast programme).This book looks at pragmatic markers in a corpus of spoken English, with a focus on the functions performed by the markers in different types of text. The author explores the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse aspects of the markers. By taking a broader perspective on the markers, classifying them, describing their class-specific properties and analysing individual markers, Karen Aijmer assesses whether any generalisations can be made about the prosody of the markers.
Brief description: Karin Aijmer is Professor Emeritus at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Review Quotes:
Aijmer's volume on pragmatic markers is thorough, nuanced, and highly sensitive to contextual factors. The role of context is crucial to any discussion of pragmatics, but is, unfortunately, all too often overlooked in the analysis of markers. Aijmer harnesses a range of corpora to aid her investigation, thus giving it an edge that many other studies of pragmatic markers lack. Further, by taking into account formal, functional, and contextual information, the author produces a deep and subtle analysis of the linguistic elements at hand... This book is a considerable achievement in an understudied area. Understanding Pragmatic Markers will be of interest to sociolinguistic researchers, discourse analysts, specialists in pragmatic markers, and researchers and instructors of spoken language.
--Edie Furniss, Pennsylvania State University "Linguist List"