"They never realized that, you know": linguistic collocation and interactional functions of you know in contemporary academin spoken english

Abstract

Discourse markers are a collection of one-word or multiword terms that help language users organize their utterances on the grammar, semantic, pragmatic and interactional levels. Researchers have characterized some of their roles in written and spoken discourse (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, Schffrin, 1988, 2001). Following this trend, this paper advances a discussion of discourse markers in contemporary academic spoken English. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses of the use of the discourse marker ‘you know’ in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) we describe its frequency in this corpus, its collocation on the sentence level and its interactional functions. Grammatically, a concordance analysis shows that you know (as other discourse markers) is linguistically fl exible as it seems to be placed in any grammatical slot of an utterance. Interactionally, a qualitative analysis indicates that its use in contemporary English goes beyond the uses described in the literature. We defend that besides serving as a hedging strategy (Lakoff, 1975), you know also serves as a powerful face-saving (Goffman, 1955) technique which constructs students’ identities vis-à-vis their professors’ and vice-versa.