Mulder-Thompson2008

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Mulder-Thompson2008
BibType INCOLLECTION
Key Mulder-Thompson2008
Author(s) Jean Mulder, Sandra Thompson
Title The grammaticization of but as a final particle in English conversation
Editor(s) Ritva Laury
Tag(s) IL, Emergent Grammar, Turn-final particle, Cross-linguistic, Australian English
Publisher John Benjamins
Year 2008
Language
City Amsterdam / Philadelphia
Month
Journal
Volume
Number
Pages 179–204
URL Link
DOI 10.1075/tsl.80.09mul
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title Crosslinguistic Studies of Clause Combining: The Multifunctionality of Conjunctions
Chapter

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Abstract

We examine the behavior of turn-final but in a corpus of spoken American and Australian English, proposing two hypotheses. First, the behavior of but can be modeled as a continuum from a prosodic-unit-initial to a prosodicunit-final discourse particle. Second, as but “moves” along this continuum, its conversational function changes, in a way that is consistent with what has been described in the grammaticization literature.

In both our American and Australian data, both prosodically and sequentially, speakers give evidence of taking another’s prior but-ending utterance as having been finished, but with an implication left “hanging”. However, our Australian data provide considerable evidence of Australian English “final but” having become a “fully-developed” final particle marking contrastive content.

Notes