‘Did you just basically steal everything?’ – A study of discourse -pragmatic variation and change

Abstract

This article investigates the use of the English adverbial expression basically in two comparable corpora of spoken British English in order to identify the syntactic and semantic changes this expression has undergone in recent years, leading to its acquiring the status of a pragmatic marker with a hedging function. Evidence from the two corpora, one created in 1994, and another in 2014, suggests that changes in the functioning and interpretation of basically have taken place over a short period of time.The analysis presented in this study shows how basically develops a hedging function from its core meaning, which may be paraphrased as ‘this is the short and simple version, but there is more to it’ (summarization). From a (short) diachronic perspective, the function of basically is not fixed, but basically continues to evolve by being used in more discourse contexts where it can acquire a hedging function.The development of basically into a pragmatic marker with a hedging function in preverbal position is recent as shown by the fact that this function is found only in the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (and not in the 1994 British National Corpus). The movement from basically to clause-internal position is the opposite of what has been proposed for other adverbs that have developed into pragmatic markers and suggests that the relationship between position and function is fuzzy. The analysis of the results shows that the observed changes are driven by young, primarily female, speakers who use basically to fit in with the social group.