Mind you

Using an eight-million word corpus made up of one-million words each of academic writing, newspapers, and fiction, and five-million words of spoken English, together with non-randomized data this paper examines 147 tokens of mind you, and its elliptical form mind, hereafter MY. The data confirm the relative infrequency of MY in general and especially its lack of use in formal written contexts. The data also confirm its much wider use in British as opposed to American English. MY is described as operating in two ways. First, MY operates in its original source meaning as an attention marker which summons the hearer's attention through its imperative form to a repetition of, or elaboration on, information already presented in the discourse. In this use, the speaker wants to be sure that the hearer understands the full import of the highlighted information. However, this was a very infrequent use of MY yielding just 5 instantiations. Second, in its most frequent occurrence (142 tokens), MY is used as a mainly non-concessive cancellative discourse marker. In this function, MY often abruptly shifts the focus of the discourse away from the ideational content of the discourse onto the process of discourse construction itself by making overt the speaker's own meaning making processes and his or her shifting commitment to previous arguments. In this way, the use of MY suggests unplanned, spontaneous meaning making. It is also argued that the way MY signals cancellation or a weakening of an aspect of information derivable from the previous discourse is often achieved through self-deprecation. The whole process of laying bare those inner workings, and especially the use of self-deprecation fosters interactive warmth by promoting intimacy and solidarity between the speaker and hearer.