General extenders in regional varieties of English - Work in Progress

Forskarseminarium, Seminarium

The English Language seminar series, department of Languages and Literatures.

All interested are welcome!

"General extenders" are collocations such as and stuff (like that), and all (that), or something They vary both formally and socially with regard to gender, age and social class. It will be shown that they can also vary across regional varieties.

The general extenders will be compared on the basis of their distribution in the International Corpus of English (comparable corpora for British, American English, Australian English, Canadian English, New Zealand English and Singapore English). Although all the varieties have extenders the same pattern is not necessarily used in the same way in different varieties which may also have "favoured alternatives". It will be suggested that some cultures and languages use a high degree of extenders to signal solidarity based on shared knowledge, experiences and values.