RT Journal Article
T1 Revisiting "you know" and "I mean": some notes on the functions of the two pragmatic markers in contemporary spoken American English
A1 Pettersson-Traba, Daniela
K1 Pragmatic markers
K1 You know
K1 I mean
K1 American English
K1 Formality
AB This article presents a corpus-based study of the pragmatic markers you know and I mean in contemporary spoken American English. Previous research indicates that you know and I mean are polysemous in their discourse roles, serving various functions in speech. By drawing on tokens extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the Corpus of American Soap Operas and the Corpus of Spoken, Professional American English, which include data from text types differing on the scales of formality and spontaneity, the main aims are 1) to compare the use of these two pragmatic markers and 2) to explore whether and how their behavior  differs in three text types: TV and radio programs, soap operas, and White House press conferences and faculty/committee meetings. The results demonstrate that, despite overlapping in some of their functions, you know and I mean cannot be used interchangeably in discourse. Additionally, the functions of the two pragmatic markers vary significantly depending on the  corpora, which is due to the particular characteristics of the speech situations in which they are used. 
PB Asociación Española de Lingüística de Corpus
YR 2018
FD 2018
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/31841
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/31841
LA eng
NO Pettersson-Traba, D. (2018). Revisiting you know and I mean: some notes on the functions of the two pragmatic markers in contemporary spoken American English. Research in Corpus Linguistics, 6, 67-81
NO This research was conducted with the financial support of the European Regional Development Fund and thefollowing institutions: Regional Government of Galicia (grants ED481A-2016/168, ED431D 2017/09, and ED431B2017/12) and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (grant FFI2017-86884-P).
DS Minerva
RD 23 abr 2026