Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T09:38:42.571Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The English general extender

The forms and functions of a new linguistic category, or something, and stuff

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2019

Maryann Overstreet
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al., 1999), a new category is identified in the grammar of the English phrase. In conversational data, the most frequent forms cited as examples of this category are or something, and everything, and things and and stuff, which are described as ‘coordination tags’ by Biber et al. (1999: 115–16). This label has not been widely adopted, but the linguistic category it describes has clearly become established as part of modern English. The term ‘general extender’ (Overstreet, 1999) is now commonly used to refer to this category: ‘“general” because they are nonspecific and “extender” because they extend otherwise complete utterances’ (1999: 3). There are two subcategories: adjunctive general extenders, beginning with and, and disjunctive general extenders, beginning with or. In casual conversation, general extenders are typically phrase- or clause-final, consisting of and/or plus a vague noun (stuff/things) or a pronoun (something/everything), with an optional comparative phrase (like that/this). In everyday spoken British English, the phrase and (all) that is also extremely common. In written and formal spoken English, forms with quite different structures, such as et cetera, and so on, and so forth, and or so are more typically used to fulfill related functions. All of these forms are grammatically optional and fall within the more general category of pragmatic markers, along with you know, I mean, like and sort of, ‘expressions which may have little obvious propositional meaning but which oil the wheels of conversational social interaction’ (Beeching, 2016: 1).

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 47 - 52
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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.)

References

Aijmer, K. 2002. English Discourse Particles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aijmer, K. 2013. Understanding Pragmatic Markers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Aijmer, K. 2015. ‘General extenders in learner language.’ In Groom, N., Charles, M. & John, S. (eds.), Corpora, Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 211–33.Google Scholar
Barsalou, L. 1983. ‘Ad hoc categories.’ Memory and Cognition, 11, 211–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Beeching, K. 2016. Pragmatic Markers in British English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited.Google Scholar
Brown, G. & Yule, G. 1983. Teaching the Spoken Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. (1987) Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buysse, L. 2014. ‘“We went to the restroom or something”: General extenders and stuff in the speech of Dutch learners of English.’ In Romero–Trillo, J. (ed.), Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 213–37.Google Scholar
Carroll, R. 2007. ‘Lists in letters: NP-lists and general extenders in early English correspondence.’ In Moslowich-Spiegel, I. & Crespo-García, B. (eds.), Bells Chiming from the Past. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 37–53.Google Scholar
Channell, J. 1994. Vague Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cheshire, J. 2007. ‘Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11, 155–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cortés Rodríguez, L. 2006. ‘Los elementos de final de serie enumerative del tipo “y todo eso, o cosas así, y tal, etc.”: Perspectiva interactiva.’ Boletín de Lingüística, XVIII, 102–29Google Scholar
Craig, R. & Tracy, K. 1983. Conversational Coherence: Form, Structure and Strategy. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
De Cock, S. 2004. ‘Preferred sequences of words in NS and NNS speech.’ Belgian Journal of English Language and Literatures, New Series 2, 225–46.Google Scholar
Dines, E. 1980. ‘Variation in discourse – and stuff like that.’ Language in Society, 1, 13–31,CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernandez, J. & Yuldashev, A. 2011. ‘Variation in the use of general extenders and stuff in instant messaging interactions.’ Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 2610–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grice, P. 1975. ‘Logic and conversation.’ In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. (eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, pp. 41–58.Google Scholar
Kasper, G. 2001. ‘Four perspectives on L2 pragmatic development.’ Applied Linguistics, 22, 502–30.Google Scholar
Kasper, G. & Schmidt, R. 1996. ‘Developmental issues in interlanguage pragmatics.’ Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 149–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levey, S. 2012. ‘General extenders and grammaticalization: Insights from London preadolescents.’ Applied Linguistics, 33, 257–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LoCastro, V. 2012. Pragmatics for Language Educators. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Norrby, C. & Winter, J. 2002. ‘Affiliation in adolescents’ use of discourse extenders.’ In Allen, C. (ed.), Proceedings of the 2001 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. Online at <http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/als2001.html> (Accessed June 22, 2019).Google Scholar
O'Keeffe, A. 2004. ‘“Like the wise virgins and all that jazz”: Using a corpus to examine vague categorisation and shared knowledge.’ Language and Computers, 52, 1–26.Google Scholar
Overstreet, M. 1999. Whales, Candlelight, and Stuff Like That: General Extenders in English Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Overstreet, M. 2005. ‘And stuff, und so: Investigating pragmatic expressions in English and German.’ Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 1845–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Overstreet, M. 2015. ‘Metapragmatics.’ In Chapelle, C. (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
Overstreet, M. & Yule, G. 1997. ‘Locally contingent categorization in discourse.’ Discourse Processes, 23, 83–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pallacios Martinez, I. 2011. ‘“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, 2452–70.Google Scholar
Parvaresh, V., Tavanger, M., Eslami Rasekh, A. & Izadi, D. 2012. ‘“About his friend, how good she is and this and that”: General extenders in native Persian and non-native English discourse.’ Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 261–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pichler, H. & Levey, S. 2011. ‘In search of grammaticalization in synchronic dialect data: General extenders in northeast England.’ English Language and Linguistics, 15, 441–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Romero–Trillo, J. 2002. ‘The pragmatic fossilization of discourse markers in non-native speakers of English.’ Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 769–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruzaité, J. 2018. ‘General extenders and discourse variation: A focus on Lithuanian.’ International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 23, 467–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmidt, R. 1993. ‘Consciousness, learning and interlanguage pragmatics.’ In Kasper, G. & Blum–Kulka, S. (eds.), Interlanguage Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 21–42.Google Scholar
Secova, M. 2017. ‘Discourse-pragmatic variation in Paris French and London English: Insights from general extenders’ Journal of Pragmatics, 114, 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, S. & Denis, D. 2010. ‘The stuff of change: General extenders in Toronto, Canada.’ Journal of English Linguistics, 38, 335–368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Terraschke, A. 2007. ‘Use of general extenders by German non-native speakers of English.’ International Review of Applied Linguistics, 45, 141–160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Terraschke, A. & Holmes, J. 2007. ‘“Und tralala”: Vagueness and general extenders in German and New Zealand English.’ In Cutting, J. (ed.), Vague Language Explored. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 198–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verdonik, D. 2015. ‘Internal variety in the use of Slovene general extenders in different spoken discourse settings.’ International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 20: 445–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagner, S., Hesson, A. & Little, H. 2016. ‘The use of referential general extenders across registers.’ In Pichler, H. (ed.), Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 211–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar