You know, I mean: A Corpus Study of English Verbs of Cognition as Pragmatic Markers in Spoken Academic English Discourse

The thesis explores using the cognition verbs know and mean in pragmatic markers you know and I mean in spoken academic discourse. For this purpose, the first part of the thesis is dedicated to discussing the notion of pragmatic markers and resolving the terminological issues of discourse markers versus pragmatic markers. Next, the class of cognition verbs is presented regarding especially its grammaticalisation and pragmaticisation with their specificity in representing mental processes. After that, it is discussed in which ways academic discourse differs from other types of discourse. As for the methodology, the examples of using pragmatic markers in academic discourse that were analysed were taken from MICASE, which is a corpus of spoken academic discourse collected and transcribed at the University of Michigan. The analysis showed that you know and I mean occur in various situations and have a large number of functions, which is typical of pragmatic markers. In some examples they have textual functions, such as helping in formulation of an utterance, continuation of discourse, etc. However, they also have interactional and metalinguistic functions, which delimitates them from the class of discourse markers. Some of these functions are hedging, either a conversational maxim, the speaker’s assertion, or some other proposition; emphasising a part of discourse; referring to common ground, and many others, while the most frequent situation in which they occur is explanation. Although you know and I mean have overlapping functions, you know is more frequently used to place focus on the addressee in order to appeal to the shared knowledge between them and the speaker, or to create common ground, while with I mean the focus is more on the speaker and their speech processes. As these two markers, whose origin is clausal, containing cognition verbs, have a simple phonological structure and enable connecting mental processes with conversational aims, they are widely used in the spoken academic discourse