In:Grammaticalization – Theory and Data
Edited by Sylvie Hancil and Ekkehard König
[Studies in Language Companion Series 162] 2014
► pp. 235–256
The final particle but in British English
an instance of cooptation and grammaticalization at work
Published online: 24 September 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.162.12han
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.162.12han
Even though final but is still a relatively recent phenomenon in British English, it is worth studying in more detail. The purpose of the article is to shed some light on final but in the spoken part of the British National Corpus (BNC) and in the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE). The examination of the various semantic-pragmatic meanings shows that they can directly be put along a specific grammaticalization chain and that instead of being explainable in terms of pragmaticalization, they can be better explained in terms of cooptation and grammaticalization.
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Hancil, Sylvie
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