General extenders in the sitcom "Friends" dialogue

The thesis explores an area of vague language, specifically a set of linguistic elements called 'general extenders' (e.g., or something (like that), and stuff (like that)). While early research claimed that these forms have primarily referential functions (category implication and list construction) and that they typically occur at clause- and utterance-final positions ('utterance final tags' (Aijmer 1985)), more recent studies stress that, above all, general extenders perform interpersonal functions in communication (e.g., marking an attitude towards a preceding utterance, politeness strategies, expressing different levels of certainty). Furthermore, due to the ongoing process of grammaticalisation (phonological reduction and decategorisation), general extenders acquire new discourse functions and occur more freely within a sentence. The thesis aims to investigate the behaviour of general extenders in terms of both syntax (sentence types and clause positions) and their communicative functions. To that end, the Research part is divided into two subchapters: quantitative and qualitative. Whereas syntactic behaviour can be objectively quantified, an analysis of communicative functions of every pragmatic marker is necessarily subject to a certain degree of subjective interpretation. The shared..