“You Know, It’s Like Everywhere. Nothing’s Doing what it’s Supposed to Anymore” : A Corpus-based Study on Sociolinguistic Distribution of the Discour…

2019

Master's thesis English EN501 - University of Agder 2019 Discourse markers are sometimes socially stigmatized by people, and researchers conducting corpus-based studies report contradictory results about sociolinguistic distribution of such items. This study focuses on the two discourse markers likeand you knowand comparisons of distribution of these discourse markers among men and women, and among people of higher and lower education have been conducted. The study uses American speakers aged 20-59 to answer the two following questions: (1) can social differences regarding frequency of employing DMs be detected? and (2) do different social classes use discourse markers for different purpose…