Chapter 5 The Pragmatics of Well as a Discourse Marker in Broadcast Discussions
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Abstract
This article investigates the pragmatic uses of the discourse marker well in broadcast discussions using the data from the British and Irish components of the International Corpus of English. Building on the model of pragmatic functions developed by Aijmer (2013), the article shows well to have three main pragmatic functions: coherence, involvement and politeness. In turn, the article discusses several subfunctions of coherence well: as a turn-initial discourse connective, a marker of reported speech, a marker of word search and self-repair; and several subfunctions of involvement: as a marker of direct agreement, partial agreement, implied agreement, disagreement, neither agreement or disagreement, and of challenge. Each subfunction is quantified and the distribution in each corpus compared. Beyond close, contextualised readings of 230 examples, the article triangulates the register of broadcast discussions, the discourse marker well, and the regions of Ireland and Great Britain.