The use of actually in a non-native English parliamentary context: a corpus study

Abstract

This paper explores the syntactic and pragmatic uses of actually as a discourse marker in Ghanaian parliamentary debates. Employing a corpus methodological approach, the paper uses a 1.9 million-word corpus of Ghanaian parliamentary data in order to examine the patterns of the use of actually by Ghanaian parliamentarians in their parliamentary debates. In terms of the syntactic position, actually occurs more frequently at the medial position than the initial position and rarely at the final position. Pragmatically, actually mainly functions as an emphasizer. Other functions include correction, contradiction, epistemic retreat, apology, appeal, contemplation, pragmatic softener, certainty, shifting focus and suggestion. These functions reflect the nature of parliamentary debates as a contest of opinions and stance taking, where parliamentarians take positions and argue strongly to convince their fellow MPs to support a certain line of policy action.