The English general extender

The forms and functions of a new linguistic category, or something, and stuff

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20356997
AutoresMaryann Overstreet (0000-0002-9479-4635, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen36
Número4
Páginas47-52
Fecha de publicación2020-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEnglish Today (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0266-0784 • E-ISSN: 1474-0567
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0266078419000312
OpenAlexW2967620471
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas31

In the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al., 1999), a new category is identified in the grammar of the English phrase. In conversational data, the most frequent forms cited as examples of this category are or something , and everything , and things and and stuff , which are described as ‘coordination tags’ by Biber et al. (1999: 115–16). This label has not been widely adopted, but the linguistic category it describes has clearly become established as part of modern English. The term ‘general extender’ (Overstreet, 1999) is now commonly used to refer to this category: ‘“general” because they are nonspecific and “extender” because they extend otherwise complete utterances’ (1999: 3). There are two subcategories: adjunctive general extenders, beginning with and , and disjunctive general extenders, beginning with or . In casual conversation, general extenders are typically phrase- or clause-final, consisting of and/or plus a vague noun ( stuff/things ) or a pronoun ( something/everything ), with an optional comparative phrase ( like that/this ). In everyday spoken British English, the phrase and (all) that is also extremely common. In written and formal spoken English, forms with quite different structures, such as et cetera , and so on, and so forth , and or so are more typically used to fulfill related functions. All of these forms are grammatically optional and fall within the more general category of pragmatic markers, along with you know , I mean , like and sort of , ‘expressions which may have little obvious propositional meaning but which oil the wheels of conversational social interaction’ (Beeching, 2016: 1)

Casual · Conversation · Grammar · Linguistics · Noun · Noun phrase · Phrase · Computer Science · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Psychology · Swearing, Euphemism, Multilingualism