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Yeah-No: a Discourse Marker in Australian English

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Yeah-No: a Discourse Marker in Australian English The University of Melbourne Department of Linguistics & Applied Linguistics Honours Thesis 2007 Yeah-No: A Discourse Marker in Australian English Erin Moore 151073 Supervisors: Dr. Jean Mulder & Dr. Lesley Stirling Acknowledgements I would like to offer my deepest thanks to my supervisors, Dr. Jean Mulder and Dr. Lesley Stirling, for their invaluable enthusiasm, support and wisdom over the year. I would further like to thank the staff and my fellow students of the Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics whose encouragement and advice have been greatly appreciated. I also wish to thank my family and friends for their interest and assurances. Finally, I am indebted to my parents for their immeasurable support and understanding, for their unwavering confidence in me, and for taking to the task of listening for yeah-no’s and reading my drafts with such relish. 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements............................................................................................................. 2 Table of Contents................................................................................................................ 3 1 Introduction...................................................................................................................... 5 1.1 Focus......................................................................................................................... 5 1.2 What is a discourse marker? ..................................................................................... 6 1.3 Approach................................................................................................................... 7 1.4 Overview................................................................................................................... 8 2 Literature review.............................................................................................................. 9 2.1 A brief historical perspective on discourse markers................................................. 9 2.2 Discourse markers................................................................................................... 11 2.3 General approaches to discourse markers............................................................... 13 2.4 Burridge and Florey’s (2002) study of yeah-no...................................................... 16 2.4.1 Functional components of discourse................................................................ 18 2.4.1.1 Textual functions ...................................................................................... 19 2.4.1.2 Expressive functions ................................................................................. 20 2.5 Response Signals .................................................................................................... 21 2.6 Studies of other discourse markers ......................................................................... 21 2.7 Grammaticalization of discourse markers .............................................................. 24 2.8 Yeah-no equivalents in other languages ................................................................. 25 2.9 Summary................................................................................................................. 26 3 Methodology.................................................................................................................. 27 3.1 Corpora ................................................................................................................... 27 3.1.2 Other corpora ................................................................................................... 29 3.1.2.1 The ICE-AUS corpus................................................................................ 29 3.1.2.2 The Monash University Australian English Corpus ................................. 30 3.2 Participants.............................................................................................................. 31 3.3 Audio....................................................................................................................... 31 3.4 Transcription........................................................................................................... 31 3.5 Analysis................................................................................................................... 32 3.5.1 Units of analysis............................................................................................... 36 3.6 Limitations of corpus data ...................................................................................... 39 3.7 Issues with the use of transcription......................................................................... 39 3.8 Choosing sections of audio ..................................................................................... 39 4 Results of corpus analysis.............................................................................................. 41 4.1 Distribution ............................................................................................................. 41 4.1.1 Distribution of tokens in primary corpus......................................................... 41 4.1.2 Distribution of tokens in ICE-AUS corpus...................................................... 42 3 4.1.3 Distribution of tokens in The Monash University Australian English Corpus 43 4.1.4 Distribution of tokens across all corpora ......................................................... 43 4.2 Functions................................................................................................................. 44 4.2.1 Burridge and Florey Functions in primary corpus........................................... 44 4.2.2 Burridge and Florey Functions in Monash University Australian English Corpus....................................................................................................................... 45 4.2.3 Burridge and Florey Functions in combined corpora ...................................... 45 4.3 HCRC coding.......................................................................................................... 46 4.4 SWBD-DAMSL coding.......................................................................................... 47 4.5 Summary................................................................................................................. 49 5 Discussion...................................................................................................................... 50 5.1 Yeah-no as a discourse marker ............................................................................... 50 5.2 Yeah-no users.......................................................................................................... 51 5.3 Form and Distribution............................................................................................. 51 5.4 Functions................................................................................................................. 56 5.4.1 Preceding utterances ........................................................................................ 59 5.4.2 Following utterances........................................................................................ 61 5.5 The possible grammaticalization of yeah-no .......................................................... 62 5.6 Summary................................................................................................................. 67 6 Conclusions.................................................................................................................... 68 References......................................................................................................................... 70 Appendix One: Primary Corpus........................................................................................ 74 Appendix Two: The Monash University Australian English Corpus............................... 95 Appendix Three: ICE-AUS Corpus.................................................................................. 98 4 1 Introduction CC07DSa BB: Now Darren you’ve kicked ah fifty three from ^nine/, they must be getting the ball down to you sw=eetly? DS: Yeah nah it’s good, it’s been good this year I been…number one forward so, it’s alright, yeah. Yeah-no is an element of speech in English which has come to the attention of speakers relatively recently. Like many linguistic elements it had been in existence for quite a period of time before it became noticed and, for many people, before it became irritating (Burridge, 2005). It became the object of derisive letters to the editor, labelled “speech-junk” in opinion pieces (Campbell, 2004) and was defended only by linguists such as Burridge who advocated its worth in oral discourse as a discourse marker. Yeah- no is often associated with the “sport speak” of less experienced competitors in interviews, and this has given this small token a negative image (Burridge, 2005, p. 6). Burridge (2005) claimed that yeah-no was “rampant” in the Antipodes, particularly Australia and New Zealand, and was recently detected in the UK. The preliminary observations of the present study confirmed the established presence of yeah-no in Australia and New Zealand but also suggested that it is used in other Englishes such as British and American, as evidenced by its appearance in scripted films and television from these countries. The intrigue surrounding yeah-no stems from its seemingly contradictory
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