Very simple, though, isn't it? Pragmatic marker sequencing at the right periphery

Abstract

A previous observation in some East Asian languages (Izutsu and Izutsu, 2017, 2020a) revealed a relatively rigid ordering of final pragmatic particles (PPs): more intersubjective PPs follow more subjective or less intersubjective ones. This observation leads us to formulate hypotheses for the present analyses of final pragmatic marker (PM) sequences in American English. A preliminary analysis of the Santa Barbara Corpus (SBC) found 20 different PMs used in two-part sequences, each PM being classified into one of three domains (subjective, intersubjective, in-between). Their orderings largely conformed to our initial hypothesis. This preliminary result was examined in a larger-scale analysis of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which investigated the 380 possible pairwise combinations of the 20 PMs found in SBC. The result supported our main hypothesis, with only some exceptions explained by the prosodic independence of some PM sequences or the flexible positioning of a certain group of PMs. We conclude that although languages can vary in the “paradigmaticity” (Lehmann, 2015 [1982]) of final PMs/PPs, their orderings reflect an utterance production process inherent in human communication, i.e., “increasing intersubjectivity” (Suzuki, 2006:36, also Shinzato, 2006, 2007) toward an utterance ending.