One of the most dramatic discourse–pragmatic changes in twentieth–century English has progressed under the radar of laypeople and (until recently) linguists: the rise of um as the predominant variant of the “filled pause” variable (UHM) at the expense of uh. We investigate UHM at an early stage of change to determine what triggered its rise. We employ the variationist method to examine UHM in the Farm Work and Farm Life Since 1890 corpus of oral histories (recorded in 1984 with elderly farmers in Ontario, Canada). Nearly 5,000 tokens were extracted and coded for speaker birth year, gender, region, and utterance position. The overall frequency of um among the farmers is 11 percent. We find no significant effect of gender (12 percent for women, 10 percent for men). In one region, there is an effect of birth year. Lastly, we find no effect of utterance position. Looking at the frequency of each variant per 1,000 words, however, we see that, while the rate of um remains relatively stable, the rate of uh increases rapidly with year of birth, particularly with non–initial tokens produced by female speakers. Our results indicate that this data covers the first stage of this change.

This chapter demonstrates how to more fully integrate an interactional perspective into the definition, categorization, and quantification of a variable firmly rooted in the organization of discourse: listener responses, often called backchannels (Yngve, 1970).Building on an interactional analysis of approximately 5,200 vocalized listener responses in 17 hours of dyadic conversations, the study proposes (1) an interaction–based definition of listener responses, (2) an interactionally accountable way of quantifying, and (3) a coding scheme for different actions listeners can do, taking into account the discourse as it unfolds (see also Schegloff 1993 on quantification and conversation analysis). Given that the listener responds to their interlocutor at any given point, the envelope of variation needs to be defined based on aspects of the interlocutor’s linguistic production (similar to Duncan & Niederehe 1974). This chapter considers listener responses to an ongoing (multi–unit) turn relative to the number of words in this turn. Zero–inflated Poisson regression models confirm that women listening to women produce the highest number of listener responses, and men listening to men the lowest. This finding is also reflected in the distribution of action types, with women in all–female dyads producing the highest rates of complex responses.

The quotative system is routinely adduced as the locus of rapid cross–linguistic change. Aside from the prodigious number of empirical studies investigating English quotatives, quantitatively driven demonstrations of change in the quotative system of other languages remain the exception to the rule. Observing that change in languages other than English has often been intuited from isolated or anecdotal examples, we inaugurated a large–scale study of quotative variation in European and Canadian varieties of French, supplemented by data from Brazilian Portuguese and Italian. Drawing on more than 5,500 tokens representing the targeted varieties, detailed quantitative investigation revealed that only in urban varieties of Quebec and Acadian French does the innovative être comme variant (cf. English be like) qualify as a mid–range – and locally conditioned – change in progress. In other varieties that we examined, including the French and Portuguese spoken in the global cities of Paris and São Paulo respectively, we find little compelling evidence of anything other than relatively incipient change in the quotative system. Taken together, our quantitative results are damaging to ubiquitous claims that simultaneous parallel developments are purportedly affecting the quotative system of numerous languages and point to the primordial importance of community–based speech data in ratifying linguistic change.

This study offers a discourse–pragmatic variationist overview of the use of pliis ’please’ in Finnish requests, making use of two different sets of computer–mediated communication (CMC) data. The aim of the chapter is to elucidate previous findings, which suggest that, unlike the heritage lexical politeness marker kiitos, pliis is preferred in a clause–internal position. This finding raises questions about the nativization process and penetrability of the clause in remote language contact settings. As such, our study addresses a challenge of discourse–pragmatic variation studies: accountability when dealing with linguistic variables that are by definition functionally ambiguous. Thus, we underscore the need for especially discourse–pragmatic studies to make use of multiple datasets, even when addressing what appears to be a straightforward question. Second, the chapter also has the benefit of contributing to the overall knowledge of requests in Finnish, about which there is relatively little quantitative research.

In the volume’s afterword, the founder of the Discourse–Pragmatic Variation and Change Research network assesses how the field has expanded over recent decades, and offers suggestions for its future development. The afterword discusses the strengths of this volume, including the breadth and diversity of topics covered. It calls for further studies of discourse–pragmatic variation in contact settings, for cross–linguistic comparisons, and for studying languages other than English, arguing that such analyses will facilitate exploration of how discourse–pragmatic variation and change manifests across languages. It also recommends an expansion of data sources, methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks, arguing that such expansion will diversify the kind of research questions discourse variationists can be pursue.

This study compares the evaluation of speech with the pragmatic marker you know to speech without any pragmatic markers. The comparison is based on a set of perception surveys, in which participants listened to manipulated audio stimuli and rated them on a series of scales. Results suggest that the classic prestige, solidarity, and dynamism model is not suitable for the pragmatic marker you know. The social salience of you know is relatively weak and guises with you know are rated as less formal, less trustworthy, less precise, less experienced, less fluent, and less determined than guises without pragmatic markers. This study shows that the evaluation of you know is multidimensional and that the social meanings of you know arise out of its most immediate pragmatic and interactional context.

The introduction situates the thirteen chapters of the volume in the field of discourse–pragmatic and change. It begins by explaining the history of the field, which was created from various strands of existing research in variationist sociolinguistics and pragmatics, and is now represented by the Discourse–Pragmatic Variation and Change (DiPVaC) Research Network, a group of scholars from a wide range of disciplines including sociolinguistics, pragmatics, conversation analysis, second language acquisition, corpus linguistics, and language contact. The introduction establishes the scope of the volume by identifying three major themes, including innovations in theory and method, innovative variables in English, and language contact, and explains how these themes fit together. It introduces the terminology used throughout the volume. Finally, it presents the structure of the volume and highlights the diverse perspectives, data sources, languages of analysis, and methodological and theoretical contributions of each chapter.

English exerts a major influence on other languages, and borrowing is a significant product of language contact. This includes the borrowing of discourse–pragmatic items such as politeness formulas, greetings, expletives, and so on (Andersen 2014; Andersen 2017; Peterson 2017; Terkourafi 2009). This chapter considers two English–based forms that are used as discourse–pragmatic items in Norwegian alongside domestic alternatives with the same function. This includes please, used in requests alongside the domestic variant vær så snill, and sorry used in apologies alongside unnskyld and beklager. Individual corpus tokens are assessed for their illocutionary force, with a view to exploring the pragmatic conditioning of speakers’ choices of borrowed versus domestic forms. It is shown that the English forms are not replacing their domestic equivalents, but the data show signs of a division of labor and there are contexts where only one variant form is allowed. The study is based on four different corpora of spoken Norwegian: Ungdomsspråk i Norden (UNO), Norsk talemålskorpus (NoTa), the Big Brother corpus and the Scandinavian Dialect Corpus.

This chapter investigates the development of pragmatic markers and critique the argument that they develop gradually by means of the grammaticalization of lexical items (e.g., Traugott 1995). Specifically, it argues that what has been said to be gradual is necessarily a case of (potentially a series of) abrupt change(s). This idea is not unlike the Traugott and Trousdale (2010) discussion of micro–changes and Brinton and Traugott’s (2005:150) “tiny local steps between A and B that the arrow ‘>’ encompasses". The view here is a generative perspective on language change, adopting and adapting Roberts and Roussou’s (2003) generative approach to grammaticalization and Kroch’s (1994) discussion of morphosyntactic change. Arguments for abrupt change are drawn from an examination of the trajectories of change of epistemic parentheticals. In conceptualizing the development of pragmatic markers from a generative perspective, the chapter outlines a schematic of grammatical change for these systems that involves upward reanalysis similar to Roberts and Roussou (2003). The chapter concludes by pointing out that different theoretical perspectives on changes to pragmatic markers tend to dance around similar conclusions, and in many ways differences in vocabulary obscure similar understandings of how language changes.

The chapter establishes a baseline of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of a “new” totally in UK English in the 2010s, as demonstrated through the BC2014S. It offers a short–term diachronic perspective on the developments of totally, comparing the instances of totally from the BNC2014S with the original British National Corpus. A distinction is made between a lexical (maximizing) category, booster, and emphasizer. In its lexical use, totally can be replaced by completely, the adjective or verb modified by totally is bounded, and the speaker’s perspective is less present. In the emphasizer function, totally co–occurs with an unbounded verb or adjective and can be replaced by certainly. Totally has been regarded as a booster when it combines with gradable adjectives to express a high degree of adjectival property. Totally can stand alone with the function to respond to a previous utterance in the conversation. The semantic development of totally from an intensifier to an emphasizer is an example of subjectification and grammaticalization. As a discourse marker with reactive function, totally becomes integrated into a paradigm of epistemic adverbials. The sociolinguistic findings point to a connection between the semantic or pragmatic properties of totally and young people, especially young females.