General Extenders and Grammaticalization: Insights from London Preadolescents

Abstract

This small-scale study investigates variation in the use of general extenders (e.g. and everything, or something, and all that) in the speech of a group of British children aged 7 to 11 years. The overarching aims of the study are to investigate whether preadolescents’ use of general extenders is socially motivated, and to explore whether competing general extender variants may be situated on a cline of grammaticalization, as determined by a set of grammaticalization indices targeting the structural properties and the semantic-pragmatic functions of these constructions. The results of the investigation reveal gender-differentiated patterns in general extender use, and indicate that productive variants are differentially affected by processes collectively associated with grammaticalization. The findings corroborate children's participation in contemporary patterns of general extender variation, and contribute more generally to empirical characterizations of children's acquisition of discourse-pragmatic variation.