Ranaweera, Kaluarachchige Mahishi Chami Ranaweera;
(2025)
A corpus study of pragmatic markers in spoken standard Sri Lankan English.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Pragmatic markers (PMs) add very little contribution to the propositional meaning of an utterance, but they are an essential characteristic of natural speech. The past few decades have seen an extensive interest in research on PMs in all varieties of English. However, there is still little research into PMs in South Asian Englishes. Therefore, this study aims to explore an untrodden area in Sri Lankan English (SLE) by examining the presence and functions of PMs in spoken SLE. This thesis examines 2949 instances of PMs in a purpose-built corpus of spoken Standard Sri Lankan English (SSLE). The corpus contains 202,557 words, consisting of interviews of 36 men and 36 women participating in several talk show series found in YouTube channels published between 2016-2021. All the speakers were selected on the basis of their use of SSLE, and they represent four different ethnicities in Sri Lanka. Their ages vary from 27 to 81 years. This study examines the distribution and the pragmatic functions of PMs found in the corpus. The results reveal that PMs in SSLE show similar functional patterns to British English, American English and Indian English to varying degrees. There is evidence of nativized PMs and nativized functions for PMs shared with other varieties. The thesis goes on to present a gender-based analysis of PM use. Men in the corpus use marginally more PMs than women, which is a deviation from the picture often presented by genderlectal research. The thesis also reveals a correlation between age and PM use. Some PMs show different patterns of frequency and different functions as speaker age rises. Overall, the study contributes novel data to the pragmatic description of SSLE and to the growing research on PMs in world Englishes.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | A corpus study of pragmatic markers in spoken standard Sri Lankan English |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| Keywords: | Sri Lankan English, Pragmatic Markers, Corpus study, Variational pragmatics |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of English Lang and Literature |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10204129 |
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