11.1 Prefabricated Chunks

11.1.1 Examples from the seminar

also prefabs, lexical chunks, lexical bundles, …

  1. one of the most
  2. I just wanted to
  3. I was gonna
  4. the fact that the

11.1.2 Prefabs and the lexicon

Automation

  • phonetic reduction (cf. also Bybee & Scheibman (1999))

Constituency

  • pauses tend occur after frequent chunks rather than at syntactic boundaries
  • are learned, and accessed as units

Source for lexicalization and grammaticalization

  • Discourse markers
  • Tense and aspect markers

11.1.3 Discourse markers

A large subset of linguistic structures exist for purposes other than exchanging information

  1. on the one hand
  2. after all
  3. for the first time
  4. nevertheless

11.1.4 Common Functions

  • turn taking:
  1. …, right? (turn releasing)
  2. yeah right but (turn yielding)
  3. uhm well, you know (turn holding)
  4. yes, oh my, (signalling attention)
  • establishing a common point of view
  1. you know what I’m saying
  2. amirite?
  • deixis
  1. therefore
  2. in the last section
  3. in conclusion
  4. as mentioned above
  5. as you’ll see

References

Bybee, Joan & Joanne Scheibman. 1999. The effect of usage on degrees of constituency: The reduction of don’t in English. Linguistics. Mouton de Gruyter 37(4). 575–596.