A Comparative Study on the Discourse Marker Oh and its Combinations in British and American English Conversation Corpora

Abstract

This study investigates similarities and differences in the frequency, functions, and positional distribution of the discourse marker (DM) oh and its combinations with other DMs between British and American English. The study uses samples from the BNC2014 and the SBCSAE. The results demonstrate that in British English, oh is more frequent, and more types of oh combinations are observed. Oh in both corpora is found to mainly serve functions in the domain of cognition (Haselow 2019) and juxtaposition appears to be the most frequent type in both corpora (Cuenca and Cirble 2019). The most frequent combinations are oh okay, oh yeah, and oh well for juxtaposition, oh no, oh well, and oh yeah for addition, and oh yeah for composition. Although turn-beginning is the predominant position for both corpora, oh and its combinations at turn-medials occur relatively more often in British English than in American English.