Abstract:
This article summarises the findings of a corpus-based study of pragmatic markers. The study comprised quantitative and qualitative analyses of a small specialised corpus of Brazilian learners’ oral production in English at CEFR B1 and comparisons with benchmark corpora. It examined the most common discourse marking adverbs used to mediate segments of discourse in conversations, the most common explicit and implicit adverbial hedges used to mitigate representative speech acts and the most common minimal response tokens used to express good listenership. Subjects produced a limited range of discourse marking adverbs and response tokens. Investigations followed a form-to-function approach and indicated that learners underused the pragmatic and discourse functions of “welt” and “actually” but demonstrated a consistent use of “really”; they overused “maybe” to convey epistemic stance and underused “just” as an implicit adverbial hedge; they produced “yeah” and “uhuh” as minimal response tokens, mostly to convey convergence.
Keywords:
Pragmatic markers; Corpus-based investigations; CEFR B1; Brazilian learners; Conversational competence