The discourse marker allee in colloquial Belgian Dutch: A case of pragmatic borrowing

The relatively few studies on discourse markers in Dutch that have appeared in recent decades have devoted preciously little attention to colloquial language and have mostly ignored potential differences between the two main varieties of Dutch. The discourse marker allee is a pragmatic borrowing from the French imperative form allez (‘go’), which has anecdotally been attributed mainly to Belgian Dutch. This study investigates the functions of allee in spontaneous face-to-face conversations in the Corpus of Spoken Dutch (“Corpus Gesproken Nederlands”), totalling 1 million tokens of speech, and provides an account of how these functions relate to each other in view of the marker's multifunctionality. The results confirm that allee is highly frequent in colloquial Belgian Dutch, whereas it is virtually absent from Netherlandic Dutch. An analysis of a sample of 500 tokens of allee has yielded seven functions, which contribute to the discourse either on an interactional level (expressing exhortation or surprise) or on a textual level (signalling nuance, word search, conclusion, elaboration and topic resumption). Its core function is that of ‘exhortation’, which manifests itself in various ways depending on the level on which allee operates and how it positions itself on a spectrum of speaker- versus addressee-oriented uses and one of signals of continuity versus change.