Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T04:32:16.877Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Variation, development and pragmatic uses of innit in the language of British adults and teenagers1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

IGNACIO PALACIOS MARTÍNEZ
IGNACIO PALACIOS MARTÍNEZ*
Affiliation:
Department of English and German, Facultad de Filología, University of Santiago de Compostela, Avda. Alfonso Castelao, s/n., 15782 Santiago de Compostela, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The so-called invariant tags, such as eh, okay, right and yeah, are extremely frequent in general English speech and have been studied extensively in recent years, especially in the spoken expression of teenagers, where they are a very common feature.

In this article I focus on innit, as in She love her chocolate innit? and It was good innit? For this purpose, I analyse and discuss data extracted from two comparable corpora of teen speech: the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), compiled in 1993, and the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LI), created in 2004. The analysis considers the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of the expression, and asks three fundamental questions: has innit remained stable in use over time or has it increased in frequency? Has innit preserved its original grammatical features, or has it undergone notable changes? To what extent is innit especially associated with teentalk, at least in London speech, rather than with the speech of adults? Contrasts are also drawn with the standard tag isn't it.

Findings confirm that innit is typical of the language of London teenagers and has not gone out of use; on the contrary, its frequency has increased over the last few years. In contrast, the proportion of tokens found in the language of their adult counterparts is rather marginal. At present, innit conserves syntactic features of its own: it does not follow the regular question tag formation rules and can represent not only the verb be but also do, have and most of the modal verbs. Furthermore, it continues to show a high degree of flexibility in the sentence, occurring not only in final but also in initial and medial positions. Finally, it appears that innit should no longer be regarded as a simple invariant tag. It tends to behave more and more like a pragmatic marker serving to express the speaker's attitude to the content of the message, thus often reflecting the relationship between the participants in the interaction, and also contributing to the organisation of the discourse. In this respect, two new discourse functions of innit are identified and described: emphatic and text organiser.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , November 2015 , pp. 383 - 405
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

A preliminary version of this article was presented at the Thirty-sixth International Conference of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN), held at the University of Málaga, 14–16 November 2012. I would like to thank the members of the audience for their comments and suggestions. I would also like to express my gratitude to the editors of the journal and to two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on the article. The research reported here was funded by the Galician Ministry of Innovation and Industry (CN2011/11 and CN/2012/81) and by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation (FF/2012-31450). These grants are hereby gratefully acknowledged.

References

References

Algeo, John. 1988. The tag questions in British English. English World-Wide 9, 171–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Algeo, John. 1990. ‘It's a myth, innit?’ Politeness and the English tag questions. In Ricks, Christopher & Michaels, Leonard (eds.), The state of the language, 443–50. London: Faber & Faber.Google Scholar
Andersen, Gisle. 2001. Pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation: A relevance-theoretic approach to the language of adolescents. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2002. Negation in non-standard British English. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bertland, Utags. 1997. Invariant tags: Pragmatic functions of innit, okay, right and yeah in London teenage conversation. MA thesis, University of Bergen.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman grammar of written and spoken English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. 1996. Pragmatic markers in English: Grammaticalization and discourse functions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cattell, Ray. 1973. Negative transportation and tag questions. Language 49, 612–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny. 1982. Variation in an English dialect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny. 1991. Variation in the use of ain’t in an urban British English dialect. In Trudgill, Peter & Chambers, J. K. (eds.), Dialects of English, 54–73. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny, Fox, Susan, Kerswill, Paul & Torgersen, Eivind. 2011. Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15, 151–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Columbus, Georgie. 2009. A corpus-based analysis of invariant tags in five varieties of English. Language and Computers 14, 201–14.Google Scholar
Columbus, Georgie. 2010. A comparative analysis of invariant tags in three varieties of English. English World Wide 31 (3), 288–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erman, Britt. 1998. ‘Just wear the wig innit!’ From identifying and proposition-oriented to intensifying and speaker-oriented: Grammaticalization in progress. In Haukioja, Timo (ed.), Papers from the 16th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, 87–110. Turku: Department of Finnish and General Linguistics of the University of Turku.Google Scholar
Fox, Susan & Pichler, Heike. 2012. Analysing spoken English: Resources and techniques for English language teachers. Resource booklet. London: Queen Mary University of London.Google Scholar
Fraser, Bruce. 1999. What are discourse markers? Journal of Pragmatics 31, 931–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gabrielatos, Costas, Torgersen, Eivind, Hoffmann, Sebastian & Fox, Susan. 2010. A corpus-based sociolinguistic study of indefinite article forms in London English. Journal of English Linguistics 38 (4), 297–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hewitt, Roger. 1986. White talk black talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 1983. The functions of tag questions. English Language Research Journal 3, 40–65.Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence R. 2011. The expression of negation. New York: Mouton De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffreyet al. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Iyeiri, Yoko (ed.). 2005. Aspects of English negation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kerswill, Paul, Cheshire, Jenny, Fox, Susan & Torgersen, Eivind. 2013. English as a contact language: The role of children and adolescents. In Schreier, Daniel & Hundt, Marianne (eds.), English as a contact language, 258–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd & Lunkenheimer, Kerstin (eds.). 2013. The electronic world atlas of varieties of English [eWAVE]. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. www.ewave-atlas.org (accessed 28 July 2014).Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd & Schneider, Edgar in collab. with Burridge, Kate, Mesthrie, Raj & Upton, Clive (eds.). 2004. A handbook of the varieties of English. 2 vols. + 1 CD-Rom: Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krug, Manfred. 1998. British English is developing a new pragmatic marker, innit? A study in lexicalisation based on social, regional and stylistic variation. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 23, 145–97.Google Scholar
Mazzon, Gabriella. 2004. A history of English negation. London: Pearson-Longman.Google Scholar
McGregor, William. 1995. The English ‘tag question’: A new analysis, is(n’t) it? In Hasan, Ruqaiya & Fries, Peter (eds.), On subject and theme: A discourse functional perspective, 91–121. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, Emma & Podesva, Robert. 2009. Style, indexicality and the social meaning of tag questions. Language in Society 38, 447–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Östman, Jan Ola. 1981. A functional approach to English tags. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 13, 3–16.Google Scholar
Overstreet, Maryann. 1999. Whales, candlelight, and ‘stuff like that’: General extenders in English discourse. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Overstreet, Maryann. 2005. ‘And stuff’ and ‘und so’: Investigating pragmatic expressions in English and German. Journal of Pragmatics 37, 1845–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Palacios Martínez, Ignacio. 2010. ‘It ain't nothing to do with my school’: Variation and pragmatic uses of ain’t in the language of British English teenagers. English Studies 91 (5), 548–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Palacios Martínez, Ignacio. 2011a. The expression of negation in British teenagers’ language: A preliminary study. Journal of English Linguistics 39 (1), 4–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Palacios Martínez, Ignacio. 2011b. ‘I might, I might go I mean it depends on money things and stuff’: A preliminary analysis of general extenders in British teenagers’ discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 43 (9), 2452–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pichler, Heike. 2008. A quantitative–qualitative analysis of negative auxiliaries in a Northern English dialect: ‘I DON’T KNOW and I DON’T THINK, innit?’ PhD dissertation, University of Aberdeen.Google Scholar
Pichler, Heike. 2013. The structure of discourse-pragmatic variation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Stenström, Anna-Brita. 2014. Teenage talk: From general characteristics to the use of pragmatic markers in a contrastive perspective. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stenström, Anna-Brita & Andersen, Gisle. 1996. More trends in teenage talk: A corpus-based investigation of the discourse items cos and innit. In Percy, Carol, Meyer, Charles & Lancashire, Ian (eds.), Synchronic corpus linguistics, 189–203. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Stenström, Anna-Brita, Andersen, Gisle & Hasund, Ingrid Kristine. 2002. Trends in teenage talk: Corpus compilation, analysis and findings. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Derek, Denis. 2010. The ‘stuff’ of change: General extenders in Toronto, Canada. Journal of English Linguistics 38, 335–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid, Tottie, Gunnel & van derWurff, Wim (eds.). 1999. Negation in the history of English. Berlin and New York: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torgersen, Eivind N., Gabrielatos, Costas, Hoffmann, Sebastian & Fox, Sue. 2011. A corpus-based study of pragmatic markers in London English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 7 (1), 93–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tottie, Gunnel. 1991. Negation in English speech and writing. San Diego and London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Tottie, Gunnel & Hoffmann, Sebastian. 2006. Tag questions in British and American English. Journal of English Linguistics 34, 283–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winter, Joanne & Norrby, Catrin. 2000. Set marking tags ‘and stuff’. In Henderson, John (ed.), Proceedings of the 1999 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, 1–8. Perth: University of Western Australia.Google Scholar

Corpora and other materials

American English Google Corpus. 2011. Brigham University. Mark Davies. http://googlebooks.byu.eduGoogle Scholar
BNC: British National Corpus. 1991–4. BNC Consortium (Oxford University Press, Pearson Education, Larousse Kingfisher Chambers, Oxford University Computing Services, University Centre for Corpus Research on Language, British Library's Research and Innovation Centre). www.natcorp.ox.ac.ukGoogle Scholar
COCA: Corpus of Contemporary American English. 1990–2011. Mark Davies. Brigham Young University. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/Google Scholar
COLT: The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language. 1993. Department of English. University of Bergen. Anna-Brita Stenström, Gisle Andersen and Ingrid Kristine Hasund. www.hd.uib.no/i/Engelsk/COLT/index.htmlGoogle Scholar
‘innit.’ The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edn 1989. OED online. Oxford University Press. April 2012. http://dictionary.oed.com/Google Scholar
LI: Linguistic Innovators Corpus: The Language of Adolescents in London. 2004. Jenny Cheshire, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox and Eivind Torgersen.Google Scholar
Daily Mail. www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html (accessed December 2013)Google Scholar
Daily Mirror. www.mirror.co.uk (accessed December 2013)Google Scholar
Guardian. www.guardian.co.uk (accessed December 2013)Google Scholar
New York Times. www.nytimes.com (accessed December 2013)Google Scholar
Time magazine. www.time.com/time/ (accessed December 2013)Google Scholar