Assessment Markers: A Corpus Study

1. Assessment Markers: A Corpus Study Caylee Heiremans LING 620 Ohio University

2. Research Area • Pragmatic Markers • Commentary Markers • Assessment Markers • Grammaticalization of Lexical Items

3. Aim/Justification • Pragmatic markers have been extensively studied, but studies usually focus on more commonly used markers with fewer forms. • Research that has focus on assessment markers has been on a small scale, using one or two forms and a small amount of data.

4. References Aijmer, K., & Simon-Vandenbergen, A. (2009). Pragmatic markers. In Östman, Jan-Ola and Jef Verschueren (Eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics13, John Benjamins Celce-Murcia, M., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (1999). Adverbials. In The grammar book: An ESL/EFL teacher’s course (2nd ed.). (pp. 491-517). Boston: Heinle. Chaemsaithong, K. (2007). Hopefully: An everyday adverb: One form, many functions. English Today, 89(23), 26-31. Fraser, B. (1996). Pragmatic markers. Pragmatics, 6(2), 167-190. Liu, D. (2008). Linking adverbials: An across-register corpus study and its implications. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13(4), 491-518.

5. Research Questions • Which adverbs are most frequently used as assessment markers? • In which register do assessment markers most frequently occur? • Can assessment markers be further classified into smaller categories? • What types of adverbs can be used as assessment markers?

6. Methodology – Sources • British National Corpus • Spoken • Academic • Fiction • News • Other

7. Methodology – Materials • Search and Find function • EX. “hopefully” “Hopefully” “. Hopefully” “hopefully,” • Other punctuation possibilities • “.*ly”

8. Amazingly Conveniently Hopefully Ideally Ironically Justifiably Luckily Naturally Really Regrettably Stupidly Thankfully (Un)fortunately Methodology – Materials

9. Methodology – Procedure • Search each term and find those instances in which they are used as possible assessment markers. • Record, coding for register and syntactic environment. • Each data entry will be also be recorded as language data and analyzed for grammatical features and propositional content as well. • Track similarities and trends across different markers. • Search for “. *ly” to find other possible assessment markers which fit the definition laid out by Fraser and the trends found in previous data.

10. Methodology – Data & Analysis • Data will be coded for register and syntactic environment. • Language data will be analyzed for • Assessment markers’ relation to propositional content • Words used in propositional content that refer back to the assessment marker or reaffirm the speaker’s assessment • Grammatical information • Subject person and number • Verb tense used • Significant trends will be coded for comparison

11. Anticipated Problems/ Limitations of Study • List of assessment markers comes from the mind of one man – Fraser • Subsequently whittled down by me • Very little previous research • “Emerging” methodology • Validity rests on my intuition

12. Expected Findings • Express speaker’s desire for something to happen or gratitude that something has happened • More prevalent in spoken, fiction, and other writing • Less prevalent in academic and newspaper writing • Those that are accompanied my words in the propositional content, those which are commonly followed by the future forms, and those which are commonly followed by the past tense • Adverbs that describe the speaker’s state of mind