‘… that's actually sort of you know trying to get consultants in …’: Functions and multifunctionality of modifiers in academic lectures

Seminars and interactive lectures as a community of knowledge co-construction: The use of modifiers

“…More recently, interest has extended to the use of PFMs in spoken academic discourse, largely owing to publicly available corpora such as BASE 1 and MICASE 2 (Simpson, Briggs, Ovens, & Swales, 2002). In her study of intensifying and softening modifiers in lectures in BASE, Lin (2010) finds that they perform functions specific to the given genre, such as promoting a feeling of communal intimacy between participants in an asymmetrical relationship and structuring accessible monologues, that are distinct from previous observations on PFMs in informal communicative encounters and academic prose.…”

“…Pragmatic force modifiers (PFMs) refer to "linguistic devices such as actually, sort of, or you know that can be used to strengthen or weaken the force with which propositions are expressed while at the same time realising manifold social pragmatic purposes" (Lin, 2010(Lin, , p. 1173. They have attracted increasing research attention in the past four decades, especially from researchers who are interested in their occurrence in casual conversation and scholarly writing and who contrastively analyse the functions of PFMs associated with cultural and disciplinary contexts (e.g., Del Saz Rubio, 2011;Hu & Cao, 2011;Mur-Dueñas, 2011).…”

Teachers and students perceptions of communicative competence in English as a foreign language in Indonesia

“…Strategic competence is associated with the interlocutors' ability in using communication strategies (Faerch and Kasper, 1983;Lin, 2010).…”

‘Ignore that 'cause it's totally irrelevant’: Marking lesser relevance in lectures

“…In this regard it is interesting to note that a little bit, brief(ly), and quick(ly) often occur with just, which may also serve a mitigating function in these metadiscursive statements (Lin, 2010;Mauranen, 2004) (41). The fairly frequent occurrence of let me and let's also mitigates by making the topic change seem less directive and apparently involving the audience in the development of the exposition, which may create a sense of a more symmetrical relationship between the speaker and listeners (cf.…”

“…a little bit, Nesi and Basturkmen, 2006), discourse markers (e.g. Lin, 2010;Fraser, 2009;Takahara, 1998), vague language (e.g. Jucker et al, 2003;Mauranen, 2004), mitigation (e.g.…”