A corpus-based analysis of the pragmatic marker you get me

Abstract

The chapter examines the use of the emerging pragmatic marker you get me (e.g. I'm just gonna give her a little backhand or whatever cos she needs to learn you get me?) in the 1.5 million word Multicultural London English Corpus (MLEC) (2008). The corpus contains 2 sociolinguistic interviews with London English speakers and the metadata provide information about a speaker’s ethnicity, sex, and age group. The methodology combines automated and manual analysis, and draws on two related previous studies (Gabrielatos, Torgersen, Hoffmann, & Fox, 2010; Torgersen, Gabrielatos, Hoffmann, & Fox, 2011), which used the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LIC) (2005), a 1.4 million word corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with inner- and outer-London speakers, also marked-up for ethnicity, sex and age, as well as locality. The analysis focuses on the extent of use of you get me, as well as its its variants and discourse functions in relation to the sociolinguistic factors outlined above. The analysis also incorporates comparisons with the use of you get me in LIC, in which ethnicity emerged as the strongest factor.