Oh, well, you know, do not you?: Socio-historical discourse analysis of Jane Austen's fictional works

Discourse markers and tag questions have garnered much attention in present-day discourse analysis, but research into their ways in the past has only been conducted recently. The present study looks at discourse markers and tag questions from a socio-historical perspective, with as its focus the Late Modern English period. The study investigates five discourse markers (oh, ah, well, why, and you know) and tag questions by analyzing their distribution across four variables (gender, social class, intimacy, and setting). The corpus was created by the author by way of a selection of Jane Austen’s fictional works during a twenty-five year period (1792–1817) and has been analyzed by manual text-based analysis and by lexical analysis software. The findings indicate that there are significant correlations regarding discourse marker use and the variables gender (i.e. female speakers) and social class (i.e. lower-middle class). Furthermore, the analysis of the tag questions has demonstrated...Show moreDiscourse markers and tag questions have garnered much attention in present-day discourse analysis, but research into their ways in the past has only been conducted recently. The present study looks at discourse markers and tag questions from a socio-historical perspective, with as its focus the Late Modern English period. The study investigates five discourse markers (oh, ah, well, why, and you know) and tag questions by analyzing their distribution across four variables (gender, social class, intimacy, and setting). The corpus was created by the author by way of a selection of Jane Austen’s fictional works during a twenty-five year period (1792–1817) and has been analyzed by manual text-based analysis and by lexical analysis software. The findings indicate that there are significant correlations regarding discourse marker use and the variables gender (i.e. female speakers) and social class (i.e. lower-middle class). Furthermore, the analysis of the tag questions has demonstrated that the function of tag questions differ regarding the gender of the speaker. The study also discovered that the use of both discourse markers and tag questions are particularly a feature of the speech of silly or manipulative characters.Show less

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Oh, well, you know, do not you?: Socio-historical discourse analysis of Jane Austen's fictional works