Discourse markers, tag questions and indexicality: towards an experimentally-assisted discourse analysis

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Some discourse markers and tag questions (e.g. like, innit?) are socially enregistered: they have acquired indexical meanings and are associated with particular stances, personal characteristics, personae or social types. This study seeks to gain a better understanding of what language users know and intuit about the use or non-use of four such structures (like, tag questions, you know and I mean), and the indexical meanings they bring to the conversation. For example, the discourse marker like (e.g. "and like she just left") may evoke indexical meanings such as young and cool; however, it may also evoke meanings such as silly and stupid, depending on context. The innovative concept of the indexical field (Eckert 2008) can explain such variation. An indexical field is the collection of all potential indexical meanings of a linguistic feature within a speech community. By constructing an indexical field for a specific discourse structure in a specific form, we will be able to show and explain its variation in indexical meanings. Such a construction process involves first determining potential indexical meanings of a discourse structure, and then mapping these meanings onto a network that shows the relationship between them. Rather than deriving indexical meanings of discourse structures from (1) transcriptions of discourse alone, a process which can access only a small portion of a structure's indexical field, this study proposes to, additionally, use a method that has recently become available through easily-accessible technology used for acoustic manipulation: (2) conducting perception tests. These two methods will be combined with (3) data collection in focus groups. Results of these methods will be used to construct indexical fields for four discourse structures in conversations among adolescents, with a particular focus on exploring the links of these structures to indexing gender. The study is, thus, restricted to structures that (a) have acquired indexical meanings, and (b) have links to gendered language use, as is the case for tag questions, like, you know, and I mean. All of these have been discussed in relation to gender. Often such studies find men using more of certain structures (e.g. you know, I mean or tag questions asking for confirmation, such as "she's Polish, isn't she?"), while women use more of other structures (e.g. tag questions facilitating conversations, such as "fine weather, isn't it?"). This study has three major goals:1. It aims to enhance the text-based analysis of discourse markers and tag questions with data from focus groups and perception tests.2. It will provide an analysis of four discourse structures in this methodological framework and describe their indexical potential. 3. It will focus on one aspect of their indexical meaning and explore what indexical meanings are activated when these features are indexing gender.This study goes beyond the scope of most contemporary theories in discourse studies as it brings together research on perception, discourse and indexicality. It responds to theoretical developments within discourse analysis, which have increased the need for perceptual and receptive work (e.g. Gumperz 1982; Fairclough 2007) and have placed understanding indexical meaning at the forefront of investigation (Eckert 2005). This is important because ongoing work elsewhere hypothesises an active connection between how we perceive linguistic features and the features we use (Niedzielski 1999, Campbell-Kibler 2006, Hay et al. 2006). This project will make a data-based contribution to the concept of the indexical field and the experimentally-assisted analysis of discourse, and will move the concept of the indexical field and this innovative method of analysis from theoretical constructs to empirically-based frameworks. By also exploring gender, this study will not only advance the field of discourse studies, but will also shed light on an important social issue.