Abstract
The present study evaluates the ongoing development of just as a discourse marker in Tyneside English. To capture the diachronic development of just in real-time, the study focuses on a sample of 34 adolescent speakers from the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (Corrigan et al.). The results of an accountable analysis of the verb phrase (N = 4,386) show that the depreciatory use of just is increasing across real time, while other uses remain stable. Further investigation reveals a significant association of depreciatory just with narrative discourse contexts. A recent framework of context-modulated multifunctionality (Wiltschko et al.) has been used to postulate the functional development of just as a rhetorical story-telling device. More broadly, this paper contributes to the growing body of discourse markers analyzed through the variationist lens, offering a systematic and replicable methodology that will enable robust comparative analyses of the feature's development across world Englishes.
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