Second person parentheticals of unintentional visual perception in British English

Van Olmen, Daniel (2021) Second person parentheticals of unintentional visual perception in British English. In: Pragmatic markers and peripheries :. Pragmatics and Beyond New Series . John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 251-276. ISBN 9789027209306

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Abstract

This chapter is the first systematic corpus-based study of parenthetical see, you see and do you see in British English. It compares (the relationship between) their clause positions and their uses. The results indicate, inter alia, that see is not simply a shorter form of you see but also that some conflation exists between the three markers. Furthermore, they confirm some of the hypothesized associations of particular functions with the left versus right clause periphery (e.g. see’s attention-getting use in clause-initial position) while challenging others (e.g. you see able to mark clauses in both their left and right periphery as explaining a previous one). The chapter also questions the notion of (inter)subjectivity’s value in the debate about peripheries and functions.