Assessment Markers: A Corpus Study

Caylee Heiremans

LING 620

Ohio University

Research Area

Pragmatic MarkersCommentary Markers

• Assessment Markers

Grammaticalization of Lexical Items

Aim/Justification

Pragmatic markers have been extensively studied, but studies usually focus on more commonly used markers with fewer forms.

Research that has focus on assessment markers has been on a small scale, using one or two forms and a small amount of data.

References

Aijmer, K., & Simon-Vandenbergen, A. (2009). Pragmatic markers. In Östman, Jan-Ola and Jef Verschueren (Eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics 13, John Benjamins

Celce-Murcia, M., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (1999). Adverbials. In The grammar book: An ESL/EFL teacher’s course (2nd ed.). (pp. 491-517). Boston: Heinle.

Chaemsaithong, K. (2007). Hopefully: An everyday adverb: One form, many functions. English Today, 89(23), 26-31.

Fraser, B. (1996). Pragmatic markers. Pragmatics, 6(2), 167-190.

Liu, D. (2008). Linking adverbials: An across-register corpus study and its implications. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13(4), 491-518.

Research Questions

Which adverbs are most frequently used as assessment markers?

In which register do assessment markers most frequently occur?

Can assessment markers be further classified into smaller categories?

What types of adverbs can be used as assessment markers?

Methodology – Sources

British National CorpusSpokenAcademicFictionNewsOther

Methodology – Materials

Search and Find functionEX. “hopefully”

“Hopefully”

“. Hopefully”

“hopefully,”Other punctuation possibilities“.*ly”

Methodology – Materials

Amazingly Conveniently Hopefully Ideally Ironically Justifiably Luckily

Naturally Really Regrettably Stupidly Thankfully (Un)fortunately

Methodology – Procedure

1. Search each term and find those instances in which they are used as possible assessment markers.

2. Record, coding for register and syntactic environment.

3. Each data entry will be also be recorded as language data and analyzed for grammatical features and propositional content as well.

4. Track similarities and trends across different markers.

5. Search for “. *ly” to find other possible assessment markers which fit the definition laid out by Fraser and the trends found in previous data.

Methodology – Data & Analysis

Data will be coded for register and syntactic environment.

Language data will be analyzed for Assessment markers’ relation to

propositional content• Words used in propositional content that refer

back to the assessment marker or reaffirm the speaker’s assessment

Grammatical information• Subject person and number• Verb tense used

Significant trends will be coded for comparison

Anticipated Problems/ Limitations of Study

List of assessment markers comes from the mind of one man – FraserSubsequently whittled down by me

Very little previous research“Emerging” methodology

Validity rests on my intuition

Expected Findings

Express speaker’s desire for something to happen or gratitude that something has happened

More prevalent in spoken, fiction, and other writing Less prevalent in academic and newspaper writing

Those that are accompanied my words in the propositional content, those which are commonly followed by the future forms, and those which are commonly followed by the past tense

Adverbs that describe the speaker’s state of mind