50
Old English Hwæt
function of you know in expressing “incontestable mutual knowledge,” where
it means ‘you know that,’ and an “attributive” function, meaning ‘I’m con-
fi dent you know,’ where the speaker is certain, based on past experiences,
knowledge, attitudes, or responses, that the addressee knows what follows.
Most recently, Beeching ( 2016 : 98– 106) has identifi ed seven functions, includ-
ing hesitation/ appeal to common knowledge (the most common function in
her corpus), word- search/ appeal, clarifi cation, attention- getting, direct appeal
to shared knowledge, repair, and “impositional.”^8 Initial position is associated
with attention- getting and direct appeal to shared knowledge, medial position
with editing and pause- fi lling, and fi nal position with the evocation of con-
sensual truths and agreement- seeking (124– 125). Initial and fi nal position are
perhaps most diverse: utterance- initial you know “tends to be used to attract
attention in general terms or to draw attention to something in particular which
acts as a prelude to the main proposition” (103), while utterance- fi nal you know
“implies that the proposition that it accompanies is so self- evidently the case,
that no argument can be raised against it” (103). In comparison to OE hwæt ,
which always occurs in initial position, it is important to emphasize the func-
tion of initial you know in claiming the attention of the hearer and rousing
the hearer’s interest (Stenström 1984 : 18; Quirk et al. 1985 : 1114; Holmes
1986 : 5– 6).
Despite its common- ground- marking function, you know is frequently used
when the information presented is not old, but rather new information.^9 For
example, in an early study, Goldberg ( 1980 : 106) found that in 73 percent of
the instances in her corpus, you know (re)introduced new referents into the
discourse. In a more recent study, Vincent et al. ( 2009 : 218) found that 75 per-
cent of the occurrences of you know in their corpus of television interviews
did not refer to shared knowledge but were “associated with the transmission,
and highlighting, of new or presumably unaccepted information.”^10 Östman
observes ( 1981 : 17, 19) that a speaker may use you know “when the addressee
does not know what the speaker talks about” and when there is only a “pre-
tense of shared knowledge.” That is, a speaker may use you know to attribute
8 These functions have been identifi ed by others: the use of you know as a check on understand-
ing (e.g., Quirk et al. 1985 : 1481), as an emphatic meaning ‘let me assure you’ (e.g., Holmes
1986 : 8), as a repair mechanism (e.g., Goldberg 1980 : 199ff.; Schourup 1985 : 120ff.), for topic
tracking (e.g., Goldberg 1980 : 142ff.; cf. Schourup 1985 : 112– 120), or in cases of linguistic
imprecision (e.g., Holmes 1986 : 10).
9 Syntactic evidence that you know often marks new rather than old information is that it cannot
refer to “islands” (sentential subjects, complex noun phrases, and coordinate structures), which
are old information (James 1972 : 166– 167, 169).
10 Vincent et al. ( 2009 ) recognize three functions apart from common ground marking: introduc-
ing a new piece of information, imposing a piece of information as an uncontroversial fact, and
emphasizing. They argue that these represent increasing degrees of grammaticalization as their
interpretation becomes increasingly removed from the original semantic core.