The final particle but in British English
an instance of cooptation and grammaticalization at work
Even though final but is still a relatively recent phenomenon in British English, it is worth studying in more detail. The purpose of the article is to shed some light on final but in the spoken part of the British National Corpus (BNC) and in the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE). The examination of the various semantic-pragmatic meanings shows that they can directly be put along a specific grammaticalization chain and that instead of being explainable in terms of pragmaticalization, they can be better explained in terms of cooptation and grammaticalization.
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Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Hancil, Sylvie
2018.
Discourse coherence and intersubjectivity: The development of final but in dialogues.
Language Sciences 68
► pp. 78 ff.

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