On exemplifying markers in present-day British and American English : formal and functional implications

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide a formal and functional analysis of a selection of four English exemplifying markers, namely including, included, for example and for instance. The analysis unveils some recent ongoing changes which point at the broadening of the structural scope of including (which used to link exclusively non phrases in the past but can now be used with a wider variety of syntactic forms) and an increasing discursive use of for example and for instance (both tend to connect whole chunks of discourse and seem to be developing pragmatic meanings, especially – but not exclusively – as mitigators). The corpus-driven study is based on the texts of the Brown family of corpora, which allows the identification of any potential diachronic variation observed at three points in present-day English (namely, the 1960s, the 1990s and the 2000s) in both British and American English.