Je (ne) sais pas can pragmaticalise to take on a wide range of functions, and combines with various gestures, especially recurrent ones. This article analyses forms and functions of the phrase je (ne) sais pas (the French equivalent of I don't know) from a multimodal perspective in a corpus of videotaped interactions between native speakers of French. Role of frequency effects in driving ongoing change is restricted to oneįorm while the semantic functions remain stable. Ongoing phonetic reduction of an already grammaticalized form. Pragmatic tokens increases in apparent time, suggesting ongoingĬhange of the discourse marker. Moreover, the frequency of phonetically reduced Other varieties of English is found, suggesting a universal pathway of Similar patterning to that previously reported for The relationship between phoneticįorm and semantic function is investigated using quantitative Referential function of “lack of knowledge”: it serves various pragmaticįunctions as a discourse marker.
This phrase has a high usage frequencyĪnd is commonly reduced in speech, two concomitant processes in Nature of the phonetic reduction using data from the Victorian EnglishĪrchive (D’Arcy 2011-2014). This paper presents a case study of I DON’T KNOW to investigate the
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