The pragmatic markers KIND OF and SORT OF in world Englishes

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to make a contribution to the study of World Englishes. For such a purpose, this work analyses the pragmatic markers KIND OF and SORT OF in four representative varieties of the language: British English, American English, Philippines English and Singapore English. After the Introduction, Chapter 2 of the thesis explains several general features of these two expressions, such as their meanings, their social function and their role in conversations (they can make interaction more informal, for example). This chapter also shows, in detail, the behaviour of KIND OF and SORT OF at the levels of morphology (with reduced forms like “kinda” and “sorta”), syntax (they can modify the meaning of words, phrases and even whole clauses), semantics (they can have a diminisher, approximator or booster value) and pragmatics (they can serve to reveal a speaker's stance towards a topic). Chapter 3 depicts the historical evolution of “kind” and “sort” from nouns in the Middle Ages until their pragmatic marker uses today. In this evolution, some important linguistic changes have taken place, such as reanalysis, metaphor and grammaticalisation (subtype II). Chapter 4 (the central chapter in the thesis) analyses KIND OF and SORT OF in the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). From an initial sample of 6,400 cases of “kind of” and “sort of” for analysis, this thesis selected those examples where these two sequences display pragmatic marker uses, i.e. 1,323 examples. Here, this work analyses the characteristics of KIND OF and SORT OF regarding morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics in detail. Finally, Chapter 5 summarises the main conclusions of the thesis and provides some topics for further research.