Chapter 6. Metacommenting in English and French
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Kate Beeching
Abstract
Metacommenters allow speakers to take some distance from a particular lexical selection, or enter into a negotiation with their interlocutors. A variational pragmatics approach is taken to the investigation of metacommenting in English and French, in Europe and Canada/the US, drawing on a range of time-dated corpora.
English and French draw pragmatically on similar linguistic resources for their pool of metacommenters, subjectivity being expressed through sort of/kind of and like in English, and genre, comme and post-posed quoi in French, while intersubjectivity is inherent in the personal pronouns in if you like/if you will in English and si tu veux/si vous voulez in French.
The linguistic forms used for the purpose of metacommenting arise from items with similar core meanings in the two languages, but develop, increase and decrease in frequency at different rates across national varieties, giving rise to regional differences and indexicalities.
Abstract
Metacommenters allow speakers to take some distance from a particular lexical selection, or enter into a negotiation with their interlocutors. A variational pragmatics approach is taken to the investigation of metacommenting in English and French, in Europe and Canada/the US, drawing on a range of time-dated corpora.
English and French draw pragmatically on similar linguistic resources for their pool of metacommenters, subjectivity being expressed through sort of/kind of and like in English, and genre, comme and post-posed quoi in French, while intersubjectivity is inherent in the personal pronouns in if you like/if you will in English and si tu veux/si vous voulez in French.
The linguistic forms used for the purpose of metacommenting arise from items with similar core meanings in the two languages, but develop, increase and decrease in frequency at different rates across national varieties, giving rise to regional differences and indexicalities.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Chapter 1. Introduction 1
- Chapter 2. Positioning through address practice in Finland-Swedish and Sweden-Swedish service encounters 19
- Chapter 3. Sociocultural and linguistic constraints in address choice from Latin to Italian 51
- Chapter 4. Closeness at a distance 81
- Chapter 5. Beyond the notion of periphery 105
- Chapter 6. Metacommenting in English and French 127
- Chapter 7. Direct speech, subjectivity and speaker positioning in London English and Paris French 155
- Chapter 8. Positioning of self in interaction 177
- Chapter 9. Constellation of indexicalities and social meaning 197
- Chapter 10. “Proper is whatever people make it” 219
- Chapter 11. Representations of self and other in narratives of return migration 241
- Chapter 12. Orthography as an identity marker 263
- Chapter 13. Positioning the self in talk about groups 285
- Author index 307
- Subject index 313
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Chapter 1. Introduction 1
- Chapter 2. Positioning through address practice in Finland-Swedish and Sweden-Swedish service encounters 19
- Chapter 3. Sociocultural and linguistic constraints in address choice from Latin to Italian 51
- Chapter 4. Closeness at a distance 81
- Chapter 5. Beyond the notion of periphery 105
- Chapter 6. Metacommenting in English and French 127
- Chapter 7. Direct speech, subjectivity and speaker positioning in London English and Paris French 155
- Chapter 8. Positioning of self in interaction 177
- Chapter 9. Constellation of indexicalities and social meaning 197
- Chapter 10. “Proper is whatever people make it” 219
- Chapter 11. Representations of self and other in narratives of return migration 241
- Chapter 12. Orthography as an identity marker 263
- Chapter 13. Positioning the self in talk about groups 285
- Author index 307
- Subject index 313
