Intensification of Affirmativity: Definitely as a Discourse Marker in Spoken Conversation

Abstract

From a pragmatic-analytic perspective, this study examines how definitely as a discourse marker (DM) functions in spoken conversation. Three corpora, namely the British National Corpus (BNC), the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBC) are used to investigate the multifarious pragmatic functions of definitely between interlocutors. It is practicable to use definitely as a DM in pre-front field and it frequently occurs in everyday language use. In light of the three corpora with respect to the DM definitely introduced in this study, there may be divergent types of definitely that occur in spoken conversation. Based on my dataset, definitely exhibits four types of pre-front use. For instance, definitely appears by itself and it also occurs with specific discourse particles such as oh, yeah, and yes and with negators such as no and not. Lastly, its repetitive pre-front use is also found. The analysis from a pragmatic perspective in regard to definitely as a DM proposes that definitely can play a great variety of pragmatic functions such as those of acting as a pre-closing device, or devices to express and solicit approval, consensus, eagerness, stimulation, gratification, floor-holding, topic-shift, intimacy, and bridging between interlocutors in spoken conversation. From perspectives of semantic and pragmatic analysis, definitely has an affirmative semantic connotation and it could strongly serve as an affirmative conversational response device.