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SORT OF IN NEW ZEALAND WOMEN'S AND MEN'S SPEECH
Author(s) -
Holmes Janet
Publication year - 1988
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9582.1988.tb00788.x
Subject(s) - sort , conversation , meaning (existential) , solidarity , linguistics , context (archaeology) , modal , variety (cybernetics) , psychology , sociology , computer science , communication , politics , philosophy , artificial intelligence , history , political science , chemistry , archaeology , polymer chemistry , law , psychotherapist , information retrieval
Sort of is a syntactically flexible pragmatic particle serving a variety of functions in conversation. At a general level sort of functions as a device facilitating the smooth flow of the discourse, providing the speaker with verbal planning time. At a more specific level it serves both as an imprecision or approximation signal (epistemic modal meaning) and as an informality and solidarity marker (affective meaning). Differences in the distribution of sort of in different corpuses relate most obviously to the context and type of discourse in which participants are engaged. There were few differences between New Zealand women's and men's speech in the total proportions of sort of used, though in semi‐formal contexts it was addressed more often to women than to men.