18 Sociopragmatic variation, sort of and genre in English and French

Abstract

Type-nouns come to be exploited pragmatically for a range of functions, some of which coincide across different languages or national varieties of a language. Sort of and genre, for example, can both be used to express approximation, uncertainty, and as a focaliser. There are, however, areas where they are dissimilar: the use of sort of as a metacommenter is uncommon for genre while on the other hand genre can be used as a quotative in the way that like is in English. In Canadian French comme is more often used both as a quotative and an approximator. The recent rise in frequency of genre in European French, but more particularly in Canadian French, and access to the Corpus de Français Parlé au Québec allow us to examine language change in synchrony and to test theories of semantic and syntactic change, weighing up the role of psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and language-internal factors.