This book is a compilation of studies dealing with the recently developed subdiscipline of discourse-pragmatic variation and change. It seeks to reflect on some of its major challenges and to explicitly widen the kind of data analyzed, the methodology, and the set of phenomena studied in English. The subtitle, ‘New methods and insights’, is justified by the content of the book, since it indeed offers both new methods and new insights on linguistic features well known to those interested in discourse-pragmatic variation and change (general extenders, quotatives, final tags, discourse like, among others).
The ten chapters are grouped into four parts (‘Methods’, ‘Innovations’, ‘Change’, and ‘Variation’), preceded by a thorough and very carefully written introduction by Heike Pichler and followed by a stimulating epilogue by Jenny Cheshire. The list of authors includes some of the best-known scholars currently working on discourse-pragmatic variation and change.
Part 1 comprises two chapters. In chapter 1, ‘Using the corpus-driven method to chart discourse-pragmatic change’, Gisle Andersen argues for the convenience of combining the corpus-based approach that is traditionally used in studies of language variation and change with corpus-driven methods, and illustrates the utility of corpus-driven methods to identify potential discourse-pragmatic innovations in his study of London teenage speech. In the second chapter, ‘Practical strategies for elucidating discourse-pragmatic variation’, Cathleen Waters reviews and reflects on the approaches that previous discourse-pragmatic variationist studies have implemented to make use of the concept of variable, define the variable context, and ensure the principle of accountability; she reaches the conclusion that the flexibility in defining discourse-pragmatic variables and variable contexts is both desirable and necessary. Her study of English adverbs illustrates how form, function, and position are taken into consideration in the study of these discourse-pragmatic features.
Part 2, ‘Innovations’, is composed of two chapters dealing with features already classic to discourse-pragmatic variation studies but that are here observed with an innovative perspective. Heike Pichler's chapter, ‘Uncovering discourse-pragmatic innovations: Innit in Multicultural London English’, focuses on the negative tag innit describing the positional and functional innovations in the use of this and other negative-tag variants. Pichler shows that close analysis of the qualitative characteristics of the negative-tag occurrences (position, scope, function, and social properties) allows for a full understanding of the linguistic feature under study and, particularly in this case, the life cycle of this change.
In chapter 4, ‘Innovation, right? Change, you know? Utterance-final tags in Canadian English’, Derek Denis & Sali A. Tagliamonte also go back to one previously studied discourse-pragmatic feature, utterance-final tags—specifically, two variants you know and right—to observe the characteristics of the change in progress by which right is increasing its frequency across apparent time. They reach the conclusion that, based on the quantitative analysis of apparent time data, lexical replacement best explains the change taking place in the Canadian English utterance-final tags, since as soon as right entered the variable system of final tags, it was available in all of the contexts in which the other variants were available. These findings contradict the hypothesis that the change could be a case of gradual semantic-pragmatic context expansion, indicative of a process of grammaticalisation.
Part 3, ‘Change’, includes three chapters. In chapter 5, ‘Antecedents of innovation: exploring general extenders in conservative dialects’, Tagliamonte revisits the English general extender system bringing data from conservative British dialects not previously considered to the discussion of the change in this system. Since these peripheral dialects are considered to reflect earlier stages of English, and provided the unavailability of comparable diachronic data, this data allows her to test the hypothesis put forward in the literature that general extenders develop from long forms to short forms. In the data analyzed, both long and short forms are part of the general extenders system, which reveals no evidence for ongoing grammaticalization in the general extenders English system.
Another of the best studied discourse-pragmatic features, quotatives, is the focus of chapter 6, ‘Quotatives across time: West Australian English then and now’. The novelty of the chapter by Celeste Rodríguez Louro lies in the fact that she offers a longitudinal study of the quotative system in Australian English, a variety of English underdescribed in the variationist literature on English so far. The system analyzed in this chapter, where the canonical say introducing speech is steadily replaced by other variants (zero, think, go, be like), adds to the interesting comparison of the quotative system across English varieties, while it also puts forward the fact that the construction of narrative discourse is also important to the development of the Australian English quotative system.
Chapter 7, ‘The role of children in the propagation of discourse-pragmatic change: insights from the acquisition of quotative variation’, is also devoted to the change in the English quotative system but from a very different perspective. This chapter by Stephen Levey uses variationist methodology to contribute to answering the question of how children acquire and employ variable discourse-pragmatic features. The comparison of the use of quotatives by eight- to nine-year-olds, eleven- to twelve-year-olds, and adults offers interesting results showing that, overall, children are registering the linguistic uses and shifts in the speech of adults (the clear acquisition of the innovative be like); yet the analysis also finds differences between the underlying grammar in the three different age groups that illustrate the intrication of maturational as well as social constraints.
The last part, ‘Variation’, comprises three more chapters. Chapter 8, ‘Register variation in intensifier usage across Asian Englishes’, by Robert Fuchs & Ulrike Gut, uses a methodology that departs from mainstream studies in language variation. Fuchs & Gut observe in this chapter the English intensifiers system in three Asian English varieties (Indian, Singapore, and Philippine) and British English data, considering twelve different registers in the corpus. The authors show the value of applying semi-automatic methods (specifically, cluster analysis and phenograms) for the analysis of linguistic variation in large corpora that are difficult to handle by manual analysis. The analysis shows that intensifier variation is constrained by formality (intensifiers are more frequent in informal than in formal registers) as well as by variety (frequencies of different intensifiers vary across dialects) and, interestingly, that formality and variety interact in such a way that cross-dialectal differences in the intensifier system are more notable in informal than in formal registers.
Chapter 9, ‘The use of referential general extenders across registers’, by Suzanne Evans Wagner, Ashley Hesson, & Heidi M. Little, offers novel insight into the study of general extenders (GE) in English and the use of these features across registers. Instead of comparing GE frequencies across registers, the authors code here for the GE pragmatic function (referential vs. no referential) and compare the proportional use of the two functions across registers and across personal vs. nonpersonal styles. Against expectations, the study finds no significant difference in the use of GEs between the familiar and nonfamiliar registers or the personal and nonpersonal styles, which does not support the general intuition previously put forward in the literature about the value of general extenders as markers of register.
The last chapter of the book, ‘Constructing style: Phonetic variation in quotative and discourse particle like’ by Katie Drager, observes discourse like to explore whether its phonetic realisations (monophthongisation and /k/ realisation) co-varies with speakers' stances and, in fact, suggests that the phonetic realisation of discourse like contributes to speakers' stance shifts during interaction. The author observes discourse segments in which the speakers (girls in a secondary school) discuss other groups and individuals, with a certain stance towards that content, and compares the phonetic realisation across the tokens of like produced by a single speaker. Drager offers examples that are interpreted in the chapter as showing that the sociolinguistic patterns observed across members of the social groups in previous studies are tied with the speakers' stance during the discourse segment.
In the epilogue, Jenny Cheshire takes the preceding chapters as starting points to set new directions for future research under four broad topics: ‘Discourse-pragmatic features and language change’, ‘Discourse-pragmatic features and the clause peripheries', ‘The acquisition of discourse-pragmatic variation’, and ‘The social meaning of discourse-pragmatic features'.
The fairly recent encounter between the study of discourse-pragmatic features and the variationist approach has already given rise to an increasing body of research facing methodological as well as theoretical challenges, and the chapters in this stimulating book without a doubt make relevant contributions to this line of research and set new directions for future work.
