This 60th collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-
On the use of two discourse particles in a local variety of English.
One of our informants works in the Hospitality Profession.
From our research, it was exhibited that the first utterance proclaimed a prevalent 85% agreement compared to the eluded choice of the second utterance that accumulated no vote at all.
Particles usually tag onto requests or questions to augment the subtlety in tone to avoid impoliteness which may arise from confrontation.
Albeit most questions in our survey have a certain degree of scepticism involved, insights were benefited from our project work.
Both particles bear a tone that requires confirmation from the directed party. It is used in a context where the party is unsure. Majority of the users harbour a degree of inevitable uncertainty.
To obtain a broad perspective of the audience’s response, a wide rang of age group which included young children below the age of ten was interviewed. However, it was observed that they could not understand the questions proposed due to their low level of English education. Older children could be surveyed rather than toddlers.
There is agnosticism involved, as most answers emphasised the fact of the involvement of negative connotations with the use of these particles.
The difficulties we expected were unexpected.
For many, most sentences have been heard of and used.
While some were not agreeable to the usage of some of the sentences, others were in complete disagreement to all of the sentences.
We discovered that language is subjective.
Improvements to be made include the ability of probable differences in the way different informants react to the particles.
The particles tend to coincide with verbs and adverbs more often than other word classes. From there, we boiled down that lexical words are indeed deployed at higher frequencies in English.
After reading our first draft, we realised that in our excitement, we had overlooked past and present tense compounds.
We found that one particle associates with ‘gossip’ often associated with housewives, especially those in middle ages and are full-
Our analysis explains for the data, it is the best at present. Since the uses of the particles cannot be explained by the analysis and the analysis cannot be explained without the data, we accept both.
More to come...