Abstract
The pragmatic marker well has received a lot of attention in studies on native speaker discourse and has served as an interesting testing ground for theories accounting for the multifunctionality of pragmatic markers. In the rapidly expanding body of research on pragmatic markers in learner English well has also claimed a prominent position, but so far no comparison has been made of how learners of varying mother tongue backgrounds use well. This article offers a Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (cf. Granger 1996) in scrutinizing well as a pragmatic marker in the Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Chinese components of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) and comparing these results with Aijmer's (2011) findings for the Swedish component of LINDSEI and a comparable native speaker corpus. Well is shown to be more prevalent overall in each of the learner corpora than in the native corpus, except for the Chinese (in which well displays a marginal incidence). This overall discrepancy between the learners and native speakers only holds for the speech management functions of well; its attitudinal functions are significantly less common in the learners' discourse than in the native speakers'. The observed differences are attributed to a complex interplay of factors, involving, among others, the learners' limited inventory of pragmatic markers, their extensive exposure to well, L1 interference, and the speech context.
About the author
Lieven Buysse is assistant professor of English Linguistics at the Brussels campus of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven, Belgium), where he teaches English Linguistics, Discourse Analysis and Translation Studies. His current research interests include the study of discourse markers, foreign language acquisition, discourse analysis and the discourse of interpreting.
©2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
