‘Well you know that type of person’: functions of well in the speech of American and German students  

Oleh:

Muller, Simone

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdiciplinary Journal of Language Studies vol. 36 no. 6 (Jun. 2004), page 1157-1182.
Topik: Discourse markers; English as a Foreign Language; German; Narratives; Conversation; Well
Fulltext: Mller_Simone.pdf (317.32KB)

Isi artikel

This paper investigates the use of the discourse marker well by German EFL speakers as compared to its use by American native speakers (NS). The analysis is based on 70 conversations in which pairs of university students retold and discussed a short silent movie they had been shown. All instances of well in these conversations were categorised according to the function well assumed in the interaction. Of the twelve functions found in the data, nine were used more by the EFL than by the native speakers. The EFL speakers also used well more frequently than native speakers did in comparison to the discourse marker so, especially in comparable functions of the two markers. Several possible explanations for these results are discussed in the paper; the most likely ones are the respective frequencies of well and so in German textbooks of English and an overuse of well in an attempt to avoid the German-sounding so.

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