In Chapter 6, there is a review of the historical record, with the help of the Oxford English Dictionary Online, other older corpora and studies by historical linguists, in an attempt to identify earlier forms of general extenders and to trace the development of those in current use. One clear pathway of change is identified in terms of phrases with specific reference becoming more general in their range of reference and even losing referential function over time. Detailed paths of development are provided for all the most common forms. The different processes involved in grammaticalization are also described and illustrated, with attention given to lexical replacement, semantic bleaching, morphosyntactic and phonological change and pragmatic shift.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction and overview of the topics covered in the book. General extenders, adjunctive and disjunctive, are defined, exemplified and their internal structure analyzed. Four functions are described, with examples, as referential, interpersonal, personal and textual. Thehistorical development of some common forms is described, as well as the processes of grammaticalization. Certain forms are recognized as linguistic variables that align with social variables to represent social markers in different communities. Translation equivalents are identified in a range of different languages and in the speech of second language learners and those using English as a lingua franca. Ideas are presented for teaching general extenders as examples of pragmatic markers. Their multifunctionality is illustrated, together with some observations on their position within utterances, leading to a novel claim that some forms can be used as associative plural markers, a feature hitherto undocumented in English.

Chapter 3 focuses on the uses of general extenders that are addressee-oriented and express an interpersonal function in interaction. The underlying concept is described as intersubjectivity, which is tied to an awareness of the addressee’s needs. Participants in an interaction are taken to be cooperative fellow speakers, adhering toGrice's Quality and Quantity maxims. The use of adjunctive forms to indicate common ground can also create a sense of solidarity, indicating similarity, and hence also signaling positive politeness. In other situations, speakers can use disjunctive forms to signal negative politeness, that is, a concern with potentially imposing on the addressee. When general extenders are used as part of these politeness strategies, they are often described as hedges, used to indicate possible inaccuracy or imposition and a desire to avoid such things, resulting in an association with approximation.

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Responses supplied by contributors from the West Midlands recorded by BBC Radio Stoke, BBC Radio Shropshire, BBC WM, BBC Coventry … Warwickshire, BBC Hereford … Worcester and BBC Asian Network

Responses to prompts for words and phrases used to describe emotions and sensations

An outline of the methodology of the BBC Voices survey and description of the corresponding audio archive at the British Library; a guide to using the thesaurus, with examples of typical entries; biographical details of all participants and a list of abbreviations used.

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This chapter analyses the relation between mass noun phrases and measure readings within Landman’s theory of Iceberg semantics. Landman not only applies Iceberg semantics to different noun classes, but also generalizes the theory to apply to DPs and different interpretations of measure phrases. These developments are then used to address the main puzzle in the paper: ‘when mass counts’. Based on data mostly from Dutch and German, Landman proposes an explanation for why not only neat mass nouns, such as furniture, admit of cardinality comparison readings with quantifiers, such as most, and are felicitous with stubbornly distributive adjectives, such as big, but why it is also the case that mess mass nouns, such as meat, can also get cardinality comparison readings in the same contexts. For the latter case, the key to the analysis is to make use of contextual portioning, a process that is independently motivated in the portion readings of measure phrases.

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