The frequency and functions of just in British academic spoken English

Abstract

This study investigates the frequency and functions of ‘ just’ in British academic spoken English. It adopts the meanings of ‘ just’ established by Lindemann and Mauranen, 2001, taken from the occurrences of ‘ just’ across five speech events in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) to see if they also apply to occurrences of ‘ just’ in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. One fifth of the mostly monologic lecture data and one fifth of the more interactive seminar data was examined across the four disciplines of the BASE corpus. Results from corpus examples show that as in MICASE, ’just’ occurs most in academic spoken English as a minimizer or mitigator, across all four disciplinary groupings, often in metadiscursive or ‘teacher talk’ frames. Although the highest frequency of ‘ just’ was in Physical Sciences, there is little difference in the function of ‘just’ among the different disciplinary groupings. There is, however, some difference between student and lecturer use of ‘ just’, showing that there is a place for the teaching of ‘ just’ in English for academic purposes (EAP) classes for students preparing for university study.