Part of
Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts: In honor of Merja KytöEdited by Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97] 2020
► pp. 265–282
The form innit (from isn’t it) is used as a pragmatic marker in the same way as yes, yeah and okay by London teenagers. This chapter discusses how this usage has developed by comparing The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT) with the more recent Multicultural London English Corpus (MLE). It includes a comparison with the use of the markers by adults in the spoken part of the British National Corpus (here ‘BNC Old’, for convenience), and the more recent BNC2014. The comparison gives an indication of how the use of the markers has developed, for instance that okay may or may not out-manoeuver yes and yeah, while innit has become an established marker.