Parentheticals in spoken Indian and Sri Lankan English

Abstract

While an increasing number of studies into the pragmatics of world Englishes indicate that sociobiographic factors—such as the speakers’ age or gender—influence pragmatic choices, most empirical investigations do not include sociobiographic information beyond said speaker characteristics. This study investigates parenthetical I assume/believe/feel/ guess/suppose/think in the spoken parts of the Indian and Sri Lankan English components of the International Corpus of English to answer the question of to what extent parenthetical function, that is, expressing either the speaker's opinion or insufficient knowledge, is influenced by structural, contextual and sociobiographic factors. Based on 1265 parentheticals, the results of multifactorial statistical analyses indicate that the speakers’ educational background and additional languages spoken at home are important predictors for the choice of parenthetical function. Therefore, the study calls for the inclusion of wide-ranging sociobiographic factors (and combinations thereof) in the description of pragmatic speaker choices in world Englishes.