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Variation in the expression of stance across varieties of English
Author(s) -
Mazzon Gabriella
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
world englishes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.6
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-971X
pISSN - 0883-2919
DOI - 10.1111/weng.12403
Subject(s) - variation (astronomy) , pragmatics , expression (computer science) , varieties of english , focus (optics) , linguistics , subjectivity , function (biology) , corpus linguistics , english language , sociology , point (geometry) , psychology , computer science , mathematics , epistemology , philosophy , biology , physics , evolutionary biology , astrophysics , optics , programming language , geometry
Variational pragmatics, one of the youngest branches of pragmatics, studies the different pragmatic values of items across varieties, and the different realisations of the same pragmatic function across varieties through different forms. Studies on (inter)subjectivity, and on pragmatically sensitive items in general, have started to include Inner Circle, Outer Circle and learners’ varieties of English, also thanks to the increased availability of computerised material. In particular, the expression of stance, one of the crucial functions of several language forms that undergo pragmaticisation, is increasingly the focus of variation studies. The paper aims at contributing to such studies, focusing on the parenthetical construction I'm afraid across texts included in the GloWbE corpus in different varieties of English. This discourse marker shows a range of stance‐expressing functions and a complex pragmaticisation path, as demonstrated by previous studies. The marker appears with widely diverging frequencies across the corpus – the study attempts to map this diversified scenario, which could point to a predominance, in different varieties of English, of different pragmatic strategies for the expression of stance.