`DREAMS SEEM KIND OF UTOPIC`: VAGUE CATEGORY MARKERS IN A LEARNER CORPUS

Resumen

ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to analyse Vague Category Markers (VCMs) in the oral discourse of Brazilian learners of English, by combining corpus pragmatics (CP) and contrastive interlanguage analysis (CIA) methods. The corpus chosen for this research is a Brazilian oral interlanguage sub-corpus from the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI-BR) (Gilquin; De Cock; Granger, 2010; Mello et al., 2013). For comparison to native English speakers, the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE) was used. The findings from the analyses provide insights into the use of VCMs by Brazilian learners of English by showing that many of them are still not used by learners. In addition, learners prefer certain VCMs over the ones preferred by native speakers. This information may be valuable to highlight VCMs that perhaps should be addressed in the language classroom or, at least, to point out some important aspects that English teachers should take into consideration.