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Part of
Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts: In honor of Merja Kytö
Edited by Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97] 2020
► pp. 207–226

Chapter 13
Explaining explanatory so

| University of Manchester

This chapter examines a recent use of so in spoken British English, namely as a discourse marker conveying acceptance of an invitation to take the floor and give an explanation. I demonstrate a long-term increase in turn-initial so, dating the specifically ‘explanatory so’ to the 2010s in Britain. Evidence comes from corpora of academic discourse, of media language and especially of conversation. I argue that the usage is a coalescence of several well-attested discourse uses of so, perhaps strengthened by transatlantic influence. I explain the often hostile public reaction by the sentence grammar of so, also offering a general hypothesis about what makes an innovation salient and objectionable to conservative speakers.

Keywords: discourse markers, initial so , current change, language attitudes, result clauses
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. So in sentence grammar
  • 3. So as discourse marker
  • 4.Corpus data
    • 4.1Conversation: Spoken BNC1994DS and Spoken BNC2014
    • 4.2Academic speech: BASE
    • 4.3Broadcasting
  • 5.Origins of explanatory so
  • 6.Public reaction to explanatory so
  • 7.Envoi
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.97.13den
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