12 - What Governs Speakers’ Choices of Borrowed vs. Domestic Variants of Discourse-Pragmatic Variables?

Summary

English exerts a major influence on other languages, and borrowing is a significant product of language contact. This includes the borrowing of discourse–pragmatic items such as politeness formulas, greetings, expletives, and so on (Andersen 2014; Andersen 2017; Peterson 2017; Terkourafi 2009). This chapter considers two English–based forms that are used as discourse–pragmatic items in Norwegian alongside domestic alternatives with the same function. This includes please, used in requests alongside the domestic variant vær så snill, and sorry used in apologies alongside unnskyld and beklager. Individual corpus tokens are assessed for their illocutionary force, with a view to exploring the pragmatic conditioning of speakers’ choices of borrowed versus domestic forms. It is shown that the English forms are not replacing their domestic equivalents, but the data show signs of a division of labor and there are contexts where only one variant form is allowed. The study is based on four different corpora of spoken Norwegian: Ungdomsspråk i Norden (UNO), Norsk talemålskorpus (NoTa), the Big Brother corpus and the Scandinavian Dialect Corpus.