Abstract
The spoken language thrives on small words that are not only highly frequent but also highly multifunctional. This chapter highlights well easily the most widely researched multifunctional item in English. We report on its frequency in conversation its positional and collocational preferences and explore its broad functional range comprising both syntactic and pragmatic functions with a focus on its function as a marker of dispreferred responses. Widening the scope of attention beyond conversation we highlight novel functions well has recently developed in journalistic writing. Finally the chapter outlines and discusses some implications for the English language classroom. Multifunctional well; corpus-based analysis of well; frequency and positioning of well; syntactic and pragmatic functions of well; dispreferred well; British National Corpus; English Language Teaching.
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