51supposed knowledge to the hearer or to pretend that the content is known to the
hearer (Holmes 1986 : 16; Erman 1986 : 140, 143). You know must then have the
meaning ‘I want you to know’ (‘listen to me now, I’m going to tell you some-
thing’), not ‘you know that’ (Oreström 1983 : 113n.; Quirk et al. 1985 : 1113).
In such cases, it seems that what the speaker is in fact doing by using you know
is presenting new information as if it were old information in order to improve
its reception.
The presence of you contributes a strongly interpersonal effect: Yo u
know may serve as an appeal for understanding and cooperation from the
addressee, it may express sympathy with the addressee’s position and thus
be an “intimacy signal,” and it may seek to make the content more palatable
to the addressee (Crystal and Davy 1975 : 93; Östman 1981 : 18; Quirk et al.
1985 : 1481– 1482; Holmes 1986 : 4).^11 It “displays the speaker as one whose
role as information provider is contingent upon hearer reception” (Schiffrin
1987 : 295). Jucker and Smith ( 1998 : 194) see the core meaning of you know
as an invitation to the addressee “to recognize both the relevance and the
implications of the utterance marked with you know .” Östman believes that
it is the pretense of shared knowledge that achieves intimacy (1981: 19), as
does Schourup ( 1985 : 109– 10), who sees you know as an “intimacy ploy”
which asserts the existence of shared knowledge from the onset. In contrast,
Quirk et al. ( 1985 : 1114; also Crystal and Davy 1975 : 93) suggest that it is
the attention- getting role of you know that serves an interpersonal purpose in
that it is a call for the hearer’s agreement. Vincent et al. ( 2009 : 223) relate the
highly intersubjective nature of you know to its function in introducing new or
polemical information.
The use of you know is particularly common in narrative (Östman 1981 : 16).
Specifi cally, “ y’know in narrative ... enlists the hearer’s participation as an
audience to the storytelling by drawing the hearer’s attention to material which
is important for his/ her understanding of why the story is being told ... [It
produces in] hearers recognition that a story is about something with which
they themselves are already familiar – something which is shared knowledge”
(Schiffrin 1987 : 284). In conjunction with its role of marking common knowl-
edge, you know can be seen as prefacing backgrounded clauses in a narra-
tive (Svartvik 1979 : 177; Erman 1987 : 85, 115, 205; Schiffrin 1987 : 274), but
paradoxically it may at the same time serve “as a device for foregrounding the
pragmatic function of the following contribution” (Svartvik 1979 : 177). While
conveying new information presented as old information, you know may also
provide external evaluation by, as Schiffrin suggests ( 1987 : 281– 282), pointing
the hearer to material important for understanding the narrative point.
11 However, Erman ( 1986 : 146) argues that you know is not interpersonal , since the hearer seldom
responds nor does the speaker expect him or her to.
2.3 Exclamatory Hwæt in Verse