14. Interactional Query Formulae in MICASE: “you know what I mean?"

Authors: John Swales
Date: February 2008
Download this paper as a PDF file now: Interactional Query (PDF)

---

Kibbitzer 14

Interactional Query formulae in MICASE: “you know what I mean?”
by John M. Swales

Wierzbicka (2007) argues, based on COBUILD UK speech data, that English has a small number of highly ‘pragmaticized’ formulae that are used to express concerns as to whether the listeners are following what a speaker is saying. She instances, in particular, “you see what I mean?” and “you know what I mean?” She suggests a) that in other languages, such as French, the frequency of equivalent expressions is much lower, b) that the use of such formulae has been increasing over the last hundred years or so, and c) that English has a disposition toward this kind of comprehension checking because of the “Anglo” cultural traditions of dialogical, careful and measured expressions of opinion and exchanges of views (see also Wierzbicka, 2006). She further finds that the comparable declarative affirmations “I know what you mean” and “I see what you mean” are also common in contemporary British spoken discourse.

In view of the above, I have examined the occurrence of such routinized expressions in MICASE. First, some basic numerical data, in averages per million words:

	Wierzbicka/COBUILD	Swales/MICASE
You know what I mean	104	81
You see what I mean	12	12
You know what I’m saying	N/A	29
You see what I’m saying	N/A	21

The actual figures for MICASE are actually a little higher because occasionally the initial personal pronoun is dropped, especially with “you see what I mean”. Wierzbicka does not discuss the what I’m saying completion, which I suspect is more typical of modern American speech. It is also worth noting that there are 46 examples of “you know what I am saying?”, but just a single instance of “you don’t know what I’m saying?. This latter instance is clearly not pragmaticized and was probably produced with a marked rising intonation, rather than the flatter delivery associated with the routinized expressions. Other MICASE evidence that supports Wiersbicka’s position includes the following: there are but three examples of understand followed by one of the two completions and none for get; and there are just two examples of “are you following me?”. Clearly the phraseology is restricted here.

Wierzbicka gives no figures for the declarative affirmations, but there are only 22 of these in the MICASE data, with as many as 18 of these using the formula, “I see what you’re saying”. And here it could be noted that half of these were preceded by “oh” or “oh okay”. The relative paucity of these confirmations is probably associated with the instructional rather than conversational character of many of MICASE’s 152 speech events. The MICASE data does, however, throw up another way of expressing a formulaic semi-query, and this involves the phrase make sense, which occurs 59 times per million words. The more frequent formulations are listed below:

does that make sense?	60
make sense?	10
does this make sense?	8
does it make sense?	5
that make sense?	4
is that making sense	2
(Single variations)	5

Two particular interesting variants are the second and fifth most frequent; note in particular that the verb is in the base form, rather than showing agreement with the preceding demonstrative (or missing demonstrative as in the case of the second most frequent formulation); this small syntactic observation shows that these ellipted variants remain fully comprehensible and that the full form is fully recoverable.

If we add together the five relatively frequent formulae we have identified, the cumulative total comes to a little over 200 occurrences per million words. While this kind of number looks small when compared to the simpler, much more common and much snappier comprehension checks such as right? or okay?, their phraseological coherence and rigidity suggests a) that they are stored as chunks and b) they can be exploited as acquirable formulae for use by international students. Indeed, this second suggestion is worth pursuing since non-native speakers of English, who represent 12% of the MICASE speech, produced only five instances of this structure (2%) and four of these were uttered by the same speaker.

It is also clear that there are individual preferences with regard to these routinized formulas; some people will consistently produce one formula rather than the others. It is somewhat less clear whether these phrases are intended as or taken up as end-of-turn signals. In a largish minority of cases, speakers carry straight on, as in this example:

there was like some sort of gap where one bird had it and one bird didn’t, you know what i’m saying like and they had to find the exact link…

One further issue is whether the MICASE database can produce any evidence for Wierzbicka’s claims that the use of these overtly epistemic invocations is a relatively recent phenomenon. At first sight, the answer would seem to be a decided “yes” because the faculty, who represent 49% of the speech in MICASE, produce about 35 of these formulae, while the undergraduates, who represent just 22% of the total words, produce around 160 of them. However, these formulaic comprehension queries occur primarily in informal and highly interactive speech events, including some in which faculty are not involved, such as Student Study Groups. While there is little doubt that younger people do indeed use these formulae in highly interactive academic discussion, MICASE does not produce sufficient evidence as to whether older people are or are not doing so in similar circumstances.

References

Wierzbicka, A. (2006). English: Meaning and culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, A. (2007). The concept of ‘dialogue’ in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. Discourse Studies, 675-703.