The Stuff of Change: General Extenders in Toronto, Canada

Abstract

This article examines general extenders (GEs) in the English spoken in Toronto, Canada, using a 1.2-million-word corpus stratified by age, sex, and education. Employing quantitative techniques, the authors assess the nature of the system, particularly the possibility that it has undergone recent grammaticalization. Diagnostic tests for phonetic reduction, decategorization, semantic change, and pragmatic shift reveal that only decategorization is visible in apparent time. Otherwise, older and younger speakers share most of the same patterns. Yet there is a dramatic shift happening in that the form stuff is rapidly becoming the predominant GE.The authors conclude that in contrast to the United Kingdom, the GEs in Toronto are not grammaticalizing but are undergoing lexical replacement. These findings suggest that discourse-pragmatic features may differ markedly across varieties and further that putative indicators of grammaticalization may not always operate in tandem. GEs provide a unique opportunity to study social and linguistic influences on discourse-pragmatic variation.