The pragmatic marker 'you know' in learner Englishes

The present study investigates the pragmatic marker you know in native and learner English. Previous research on you know has suggested that it is highly frequent among native speakers but is used much less by non-native speakers, and that the latter do not use it intersubjectively but rather for discourse-organisational purposes. These claims are put to the test in a quantitative and qualitative analysis of four components of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI), involving upper-intermediate to advanced Dutch, French, German and Spanish learners of English. Comparisons are made with native discourse as it appears in LINDSEI’s reference corpus LOCNEC. Nine functions are attested for you know in the corpus, and none of these are restricted to the native corpus. Native and non-native speakers alike use you know in highly intersubjective contexts. The main differences between speaker groups are found in the frequency of use: all learner groups use you know consistently less frequently than their native peers, and there are markedly fewer learners in each group who use you know at all.

Publication year:2017