French Language Variation and Change

The grammaticalization of discourse markers is another research topic that I started to explore over the past years. Compared to variables at other levels of linguistic structure, such as syntactic variables, discourse markers usage is an area of the language where one can observe variation and change over a relatively short period of time. In sociolinguistics, the study of discourse markers is situated within the domain of discourse-pragmatic variation and change, a burgeoning area of research (D’Arcy, 2017; Pichler, 2010, 2013, & 2016). Broadly defined, discourse-pragmatic features include discourse markers or pragmatic particles whose primary functions are interpersonal and textual. By examining corpus data, one can get more insights into how a particle becomes grammaticalized over time and how speakers’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds participate in their process of acquisition.