The extender tags and the like and or something in late Modern English: A formal and functional approach

Abstract

Extender tags can be defined as a class of expressions of the type and stuff and or something that are added to the end of phrases, sometimes in clause-final position in order to extend otherwise complete utterances (Overstreet 1999). Although such expressions have been broadly studied in present-day English from very diverse perspectives, a thorough historical examination of these forms is still lacking. The aim of this dissertation is to offer a corpus-based analysis of the extender tags and the like and or something in the late Modern English period (1700 - 1900), with data from the Eighteenth Century Fiction and the Nineteenth Century Fiction. The main focus of the thesis is on the formal and textual features of these tags, as well as on the functions they perform during this period. Attention is also paid to their historical development from the point of view of grammaticalization.