11.1 Prefabricated Chunks

11.1.1 Examples from the seminar

also prefabs, lexical chunks, lexical bundles, …

64. one of the most
65. I just wanted to
66. I was gonna
67. 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

68. on the one hand
69. after all
70. for the first time
71. nevertheless

11.1.4 Common Functions

• turn taking:

72. …, right? (turn releasing)
73. yeah right but (turn yielding)
74. uhm well, you know (turn holding)
75. yes, oh my, (signalling attention)

• establishing a common point of view

76. you know what I’m saying
77. amirite?

• deixis

78. therefore
79. in the last section
80. in conclusion
81. as mentioned above
82. 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.