Understanding vagueness: A prosodic analysis of endocentric and exocentric general extenders in English conversation

Recent research has evidenced the role of general extenders as specific pragmatic markers that contribute to the understanding of the dynamics of conversation, in spite of the vagueness of their meaning (Aijmer, 2013, Buysse, 2014 and Palacios-Martínez, 2011). Nevertheless, the specific prosodic features of general extenders in English conversation have not benefited from the detailed prosodic analysis that other types of pragmatic markers have attracted in native and non-native speakers (Romero-Trillo, 2014, Romero-Trillo, 2015a, Romero-Trillo, 2015b and Romero-Trillo and Newell, 2012).The present paper will investigate the prosodic patterns of general extenders in English conversation and will show how their patterns determine their functions and distribution, thus showing that vagueness does not mean randomness in their case.