130 Anna-Brita Stenström
2.2 OkayThe origin of okay has triggered a great deal of speculation, but there does not
seem to be a definitive answer.^1 Some of its uses can still be described in gram-
matical terms, since it can be used as an adverb (The car’s going okay now), as
an adjective (Is my hair okay?), as a verb (Has the bank okayed your request for
a loan?) and as a noun (I got the OK to leave early) (see Longman Dictionary of
Contemporary English 1987: 719).
Today, okay is mainly used as a pragmatic marker and, like vale, it can have a
reactive function, e.g. when responding to a question or a request (A: can I close
this game – B: okay), as well as a directive function, when added as a tag (A: next
time you give it to me okay – B: no), or a reorienting function changing the direc-
tion of the discourse (cos of what happened at Lucy’s party I I don’t know on that
situation but okay then, let’s not take James). One of the functions of okay that is
not shared by vale is as a ‘discourse-initiating device’ (okay now ...), as suggested
by Quirk et al. (1985: 633), which is equivalent to right now ... (For an exhaus-
tive article on the ‘functional polysemy of discourse particles’, including okay, see
Fischer 2006.)- Three levels
A rough classification, partly influenced by Cestero Mancera and Moreno
Fernández (2008), of how vale and okay are used in the corpora on the interac-
tional, interpersonal and discourse levels is presented in Figure 1.INTERACTIONAL INTERPERSONAL DISCOURSE
Directive Reactive
request assent empathize reorient
appeal acknowledge threaten self-react
close-intro close-end appeaseFigure 1. Levels of analysis- As a curiosity may be mentioned that, according to Wikipedia, the first documented exam-
ple of okay is the sentence ‘we arrived OK’, written in a diary from 1815.