Date of Award
2012
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in English Composition
Department
English
First Advisor
Vickers, Caroline
Second Advisor
Smith, Wendy
Abstract
This thesis examines real language in use to observe the different intonation contours associated with the discourse marker "whatever" to see if or how these contours contribute to the pragmatic meaning associated with the different functions. Interactional sociolinguistic and conversational analysis approach to investigate the different pragmatic meaning associated with the discourse marker "whatever" were employed to carry out the analysis. In addition, corpus linguistic methodology was used to gather data to investigate the different pragmatic meanings of the word "whatever."
Recommended Citation
Wahler, Pamela Kathleen, "Whatever: Prosodic context cues and their influence on pragmatic meaning" (2012). Theses Digitization Project. 4194.
https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/4194
