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Pragmatic Markers in British English
Meaning in Social Interaction
Kate Beeching
Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139507110
Online ISBN: 9781139507110
Hardback ISBN: 9781107032767
Chapter
5 - You know pp. 97-125
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139507110.006
Cambridge University Press

5 You know
5.1 Introduction
Though it is often said to serve ‘as a mere gap-filler in conversation’,1 you know
ostensibly lays greater claim to interpersonality than some other pragmatic
markers treated in this volume through the inclusion of the second-person
pronoun you. It enjoins the interlocutor to share or collude in the speaker’s
opinions. It has been the focus of a number of studies,2 which range from analyses
of its functions in spoken interaction in contemporary British, New Zealand and
American English, to a consideration of its sociolinguistic stratification and
salience in the UK, to comparisons of native and non-native uses and, finally, to
its historical development and role in illustrating the evolution of intersubjective
from subjective meanings.
Pragmatic marker you know can be distinguished from canonical ‘you know’
on semantic, syntactic and prosodic grounds. Pragmatic marker you know can
be omitted from an utterance without loss of sense or grammaticality. In the
utterance, ‘You know (that) I love you, because I married you’, you know
cannot be omitted without changing the semantics which involves the hearer’s
knowledge (that the speaker loves him/her). By contrast, in the utterance ‘you
know, I love you – and that’s why I married you’, you know could be omitted
with no loss of propositional meaning, it is syntactically non-integrated and is
prosodically detached, having its own tone unit. That is not to say that it is
always straightforward to distinguish between canonical you know and prag-
matic marker you know, particularly where one has access only to the transcrip-
tions (which generally do not include commas) and not to the sound-files where
the intonation patterns can be attended to.
1
Concise Oxford English Dictionary 1976 edition.
2
Goldberg (1980); Östman (1981); Schourup (1985: 94–139); Erman (1986, 1987, 2001); Holmes
(1986; 1995); Schiffrin (1987: 267–295); Crystal (1988: 47–48); Watts (1989: 216–221);
Redeker (1991); Stenström (1995); Stubbe and Holmes (1995); He and Lindsay (1998); Jucker
and Smith (1998); Biber at al. (1999); Fox Tree and Schrock (2002); Macaulay (2002);
Fitzmaurice (2004); Müller (2005: 147–196); Denke (2009: 85–94); and Lin (2010).
97
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98 You know
5.2 Functions
Amongst its many functions, which will be illustrated in this section, the core
function of pragmatic marker you know might be said to create common ground
between speakers – or, indeed, to create fictive common ground; by using it, the
speaker pretends shared knowledge and can make a bid for intimacy (Östman
1981). This section will provide a list of commonly recognised functions of this
marker with examples from the spoken corpora consulted.
Functions of you know can be divided between textual and interpersonal
functions, or as Erman (2001:1341) does, between text-monitors, social moni-
tors and metalinguistic monitors, as follows:
text monitors social monitors metalinguistic monitors
Discourse markers, Editing Interactive markers (including Approximators, Hedges,

markers (including Repair Turn-regulators), Emphasisers
markers and Hesitation markers) Comprehension-securing
markers
You know is often claimed to have similar textual functions to other pragmatic
markers. As Zheng (2012: 135–136) points out, you know is frequently cited in
the literature as marking a hesitation or word-search or to fill a pause (‘hesita-
tion’, Erman 2001; ‘word search’, Müller 2005; ‘stalling’ and ‘word search’,
Denke 2009; ‘fumble’, House 2009). It can be used in repairs or corrections
(‘false start’, Holmes 1986; ‘predictable repairs’, Fox Tree and Schrock 2002;
‘correction’ and ‘restart’, Denke 2009). It can be used to preface an explanation
(‘attributive’, Holmes 1986; ‘discourse marker use’, Erman 2001; ‘clarification’,
Fox Tree and Schrock 2002; Müller 2005; ‘explication, clarification’, Redeker
2006; ‘addition’, ‘modification’ and ‘exemplification’, Denke 2009). Finally, it
can be used to introduce a quote (Schiffrin 1987; Müller 2005; Redeker 2006;
‘reported speech’, Denke 2009).
However, because the core meaning of you know combines both the second
person pronoun you with the cognitive verb know, it has a stronger appeal to the
addressee and to shared knowledge than, for example, I mean, like or sort of,
which might also be used in similar functional contexts. When you know
prefaces a correction or an explanation, the speaker appeals to an understanding
of the situation, or for help in the wording, which the interlocutor might be
expected to supply.
This appeal to common knowledge is more evident and explicit in inter-
personal usages. In these contexts, you know can check for common knowledge
(‘camaraderie’, Östman 1981; ‘conjoint knowledge’, Holmes 1986; ‘transition
to shared knowledge’, Schiffrin 1987; ‘ emphasiser’, Erman 2001). It can
5.2 Functions 99
also approximate or provide insufficient information (‘uncertainty’, Östman

1981; ‘lexical imprecision’ and ‘qualifying’, Holmes 1986 ; ‘approximator’,
Erman 2001) and appeal for understanding, sometimes with rising intonation
(‘plea for validation’, Holmes 1986; ‘right-hand bracket use’, Watts 1989;
‘hedge’, Erman 2001; Müller 2005).
5.2.1 Hesitation and appeal to common knowledge

Example 5.1 is a typical example of the way that speakers use you know to both
hesitate and enjoin their interlocutor to fill in the gaps in what is being said and
co-construct meaning.
(5.1) a: I know / well listen to this right/ I just saw an opportunity for both of us to
get jobs at this big company=
b: =wow
a: yeah, I know/ I’m so excited/ I’m sure you’ll absolutely love it=
b: = yeah, yeah =
a: = and it’s with a big company and they are willing to pay us to work for
the whole summer which means that you know between you know work
gain experience all of this like what do you think? you’re not very
enthusiastic about it
A starts to spell out the implications of spending the whole summer being
paid to work for a big company. She starts with ‘which means that’ and runs out
of steam in her attempt to list the advantages this would have. She uses you
know to cover the breakdown of articulacy, to appeal to her interlocutor to fill in
the gaps through their common knowledge of the advantages of work experi-
ence. She ends up with a slightly incoherent list, punctuated with ‘between’, to
conjure up what she is trying to say: ‘you know between you know work gain
experience all of this like’.
5.2.2 Word search and appeal to the interlocutor to fill in the gap
Speakers also use you know to invite the collaboration of their interlocutor to
find the right words. In 5.2, the speaker is struggling to find a way to say that
employers would appreciate the fact that a job-seeker had had the initiative to
take themselves abroad on an independent venture.
(5.2) a: yeah but wouldn’t they want wouldn’t they want someone who’s you
know like gone out and like gone out on their own and got this amazing
experience?
She starts by repeating ‘wouldn’t they want’, initiates ‘someone who’ but
then stalls in her search for a way to express herself. In hesitating, she appeals to
her interlocutor with you know, continues to hesitate with like, which also
100 You know
indicates the approximate nature of the expression she’s found – ‘gone out’ –
which she repeats and elaborates on ‘like gone out on their own’. She now
completes the phrase in a fully articulate way ‘and got this amazing experi-
ence’. Pragmatic markers are perfectly adapted to the linear online editing
which is required in spontaneous speech, providing the cement which allows
the discourse to build in a cyclic manner, phrase by phrase.
Fernandez (1994: 178) terms this successive backtracking, repeating and
gradual building up of the spoken message as a piétinement syntaxique, ‘a
syntactic pawing of the ground’ or ‘marking of time’. The recursive nature of
the piétinement can be better demonstrated on the page using the vertical axis,
as the piétinements temporarily interrupt the syntagmatic development of the
utterance (on the horizontal axis):
wouldn’t they want
wouldn’t they want someone who’s you know like
gone out and
gone out on their own and got this amazing experience?
The proposition, highlighted in bold, moves gradually towards its conclusion
while the repetitions and markers mark time and provide speakers with the
opportunity to formulate and edit their message spontaneously in real time.
Extracting the proposition outlined in bold does not usually constitute a problem
for native speakers, but can prove a barrier to comprehension for learners of the
language.
5.2.3 Clarification and appeal to common knowledge

(5.3) b: um . . . yeah . . . no . . . to be honest I think I’m just set on you know1
going and doing this/ I mean I’m in the same boat/ I’ve got to find money
for m to pay my mortgage but I’ve managed to rent it out it’s really easy
actually if you could [you know2 you should look into it
a: [I’m not sure I’m not sure I’d
be comfortable with people I didn’t know in my house though
b: well obviously you have like a letting agent and everything looking after
it for you
a: I just it’s just there’s something weird about it/ you know3/ it’s just my
own home/I just don’t think I’d want people in it/ um so really money has
to be the priority for me this this summer=
In example (5.3), you know1 and you know2 are hesitation markers and appeals
to A, firstly to understand B’s desire to go off to a different country for the summer
months, and secondly to consider also letting her property to help pay the mort-
gage. A says she does not feel comfortable letting her property – but the situation is
delicate, as B has explained that she has happily rented her house out. She fumbles
with ‘I just it’s just there’s something weird about it’ and goes on, after you know,
5.2 Functions 101
with a clarification of what is weird about letting it out. She explains that it is ‘my
own home’ and ‘I don’t think I’d want people in it’. You know prefaces a
clarification or explanation, but it also appeals to B’s understanding of her feelings
about strangers living in her house (four occurrences of just here reflect A’s
minimisation of her rationale and attempt to save B’s face – these are ‘just’ her
feelings and are not intended as a criticism of what B has done).
5.2.4 Attention-getting/launching a new piece of information

In initial position, you know attracts the listener’s attention and points out a new
piece of information.
(5.4) b: = it’s a terrible situation that everyone’s in =
a: = it is
b: = and I you know1 they are doing some really amazing things out there/
and I just th I just think you know2 like you can rent your house out it’s
no real effort/ if anything goes wrong you’ve got your insurance and
everything is covered in it=
In (5.4), you know1 launches the proposition ‘they are doing some really
amazing things out there’. In this case, you know does not appeal to shared
knowledge, but rather draws attention to a new piece of knowledge that B
wishes to share with A. This initiating you know is similar to the prefatory ‘You
know what?’ which draws attention and introduces a new proposition.
You know2 in this example, however, is similar to the hesitatory function in
(5.1). B is reiterating her argument to A that she should rent out her house.
However, given A’s objection to this, the argument has to be tentative and hedged.
This face-saving tactic is evident in the repetitions ‘I just th I just think’ and the
proliferation of mitigating markers, just, you know and like which preface ‘you can
rent your house out’. The package ‘I just th I just think you know like you can rent
your house out’ is a paradigm of informal hedged suggestion.
5.2.5 Direct appeal to shared knowledge/initiating a topic

(5.5) a: Hi um well you know we finish college well uni. in two weeks/ I was
thinking why don’t we do some volunteering because I think it’ll be
really good for us it’ll look good on our CV and things for next year
Similar to (5.4), but more direct and closer to the propositional meaning of
you know, are examples like (5.5). A appeals directly to the knowledge that the
two speakers share about finishing college in two weeks as a prelude to
suggesting doing some volunteering. ‘You know we finish college in two
weeks’ is framed as a type of question but it is evidently a question which
does not invite a reply (like ‘You know what? (I think I’ll cook fish tonight)’.)
102 You know
5.2.6 Repair
You know is also used to repair in syntactic reformulations where the speaker
stops mid-flow and changes tack to reformulate a construction.
(5.6) b: yeah . . . no. I think it’d be good it looks good if you are doing it outside
of school you really look like you’re really trying to you know they
don’t need to know it’s for money it would look good to join a big
company
The speakers are talking about how some work experience would look good
on their CVs. B is arguing that getting a summer job would be beneficial. She
starts to say ‘you’re really trying to’, and the thought process probably went on
along the lines of ‘develop your skills’. She cuts this utterance short, though,
with you know and changes tack to offer a clarification ‘they don’t need to know
it’s for money’. You know serves several functions, it appeals to the interlocu-
tor’s background knowledge to fill in the phrase ‘you’re really trying to you
know’ and also bridges the gap to the clarification ‘they don’t need to know it’s
for money’. In that way, it serves a rather different function from I mean, which
introduces a correction more overtly, and from like, which is more of an
approximator than a repair marker.
This type of repair is particularly evident in (5.7), where the speaker changes
syntactic construction mid-flow three times:
(5.7) I’m sort of lacking in experience/ and some some other people have been
working in business up until you know from the age of 16 and so I’m not you
know I just don’t have any sort of you know I need I need to get more
experience
When the speaker arrives at the end of ‘other people have been working in
business up until’, she realises that ‘up until’ was not what she meant to say,
she meant ‘from the age of’ – you know flags the repair. The other two
examples of you know do not repair what has already been said from a factual
point of view but flag a change of syntactic direction. ‘So I’m not’ is repaired
to ‘I just don’t have any sort of’ and ‘I just don’t have any sort of’ is repaired
to ‘I need to get more experience’. In both cases the repair is punctuated by
you know. Using you know rather than I mean to introduce the repair invites
the listener to become involved in the speaker’s construction of their mes-
sage. It is addressee-orientated.
5.2.7 You know in final position: pointing out a self-evident

truth/impositional
You know with falling intonation at the end of an utterance can be used (slightly
patronisingly) to point up a self-evident fact.
5.2 Functions 103
(5.8) b: not that’s very um that’s very true but you also have yourself to think of
you know1 you have to think about supporting yourself I mean you
know2 you can’t you can’t survive by doing voluntary work you
know3
In (5.8), you know1 and 2 are familiar usages similar to the example in 5.2.3,
serving to introduce a clarification. Utterance-final you know3 with falling
intonation is very different in tone. It implies that the proposition that it
accompanies is so self-evidently the case, that no argument can be raised
against it and that the addressee is rather stupid if they do not recognise this
self-evident truth. This type of you know is a powerful argumentative tool and
can be impositional (see also Sebba and Tate 1986, and the discussion of this in
Vincent et al. 2009, summarised in Section 5.4 below). Schiffrin (1987: 275)
refers to such utterance-final occurrences of y’know as markers of consensual
truths, which are often present in the context of tautologies ‘A bastard’s a
bastard regardless y’know’ is one example she gives, though she goes on to say
that (1987: 276):
Y’know as a marker of consensual truths occurs not only with formulaic expressions and
tautologies, but with general descriptions (e.g. of situations, states, event). Speakers
often use general descriptions to support their more specific claims and to gain their
hearers’ endorsement of their claims.
She goes on to give the example:
We’re not all perfect, y’know.
It is striking that you know appears in the final position in all of these
examples. In (5.8), the speaker asserts the consensual truth that ‘you can’t
survive by doing voluntary work you know’ to support his argument that
the speakers should spend (at least part of) their summer holiday doing
paid work.
The functions of you know differ depending on its position in the utterance.
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. Medial you know tends to be used to repair and to
invite co-construction, either of the content or of the formulation of the
message. When it is used with falling intonation, final you know, which
occurs after the message has been delivered, does not invite co-construction
and tends to reinforce the message, implying that the proposition is self-
evident. In final position with rising intonation (you know?), the message is
portrayed as self-evident but agreement is sought from the interlocutor.
Anecdotally, final you know? seems more common in US than in UK
English. This impression is confirmed by comparing frequency rates in the
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the BNC which are
104 You know
found to be 24.19 vs 15.89 per million words.3 There were no examples of

you know? in the UWE Role-play data.
5.2.8 Most frequently used functions of you know

Table 5.1 displays the raw numbers of occurrences of you know in the spoken
demographic and context-governed sections of the BNC Sampler and in the
UWE Role-play Corpus.
The form you know is more frequent overall in what might be considered to
be less formal contexts, in the leisure and spoken demographic sections of the
BNC, and in the UWE Role-play and far less frequent in what might be
considered more public, formal, situations, education, business and institu-
tional. We would expect pragmatic markers to occur more frequently in
informal contexts so this is unsurprising. However, the low rate of usage and
the split between non-pragmatic marker and pragmatic marking usages in the
educational genre is initially rather surprising.
One hundred occurrences of you know were extracted randomly from the
spoken demographic and context-governed files of the BNC Sampler and from
the UWE Role-play Corpus for detailed analysis and categorisation according
to the functions identified in Sections 5.2.1–5.2.7. Propositional you know can
be distinguished from pragmatic marker you know by syntactic criteria, such as
the inclusion of the auxiliary ‘do’ in ‘do you know’ or the presence of an object,
as in ‘you know what to do’. A number of the pragmatic marker categories
overlap: you know generally appeals to common knowledge, but this appeal can
sometimes lead to a clarification. The position of you know in the utterance can
indicate the function. For example, when placed initially, you know is often an
attention-getter or a direct appeal to shared knowledge. When placed finally, it
Table 5.1. Raw numbers and rates of occurrences of you know in different
genres in the BNC Sampler + UWE Role-play data
UWE Spoken
Genres Leisure Role-play demographic Education Business Insitutional
Word count 136,606 51,417 493, 852 80,463 134,275 145,508

You know – N 608 209 1843 130 206 158
Rate of you know 44.5 40.6 37.3 16 15 10.8
per 10,000
words
3
I acknowledge my indebtedness to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
Table 5.2. The functions of you know in 100 representative occurrences per sub-genre contained in the BNC Sampler + UWE
Role-play data
UWE Spoken
Genre/functions Leisure Role-play demographic Education Business Institutional Total
Non-pragmatic marker/ 14 12 32 50 24 44 176

propositional usages
Pragmatic marking Hesitation/Appeal to common 58 74 50 30 38 34 284
usages knowledge
Word-search/appeal 6 2 8 6 12 8 42
Clarification 8 6 2 4 2 8 30
Attention-getting 8 2 4 4 10 2 30
Direct appeal to shared knowledge 0 2 4 0 0 0 6
Repair 4 0 0 4 2 2 12
Impositional 2 2 0 2 12 2 20
D-value 86% 88% 68% 50% 76% 66% 71%
106 You know
can be impositional. The vast majority of the occurrences in the data examined
were placed medially and most of those were hesitations/appeals to common
knowledge. The results of the analysis are displayed in Table 5.2.
The greatest usage of pragmatic marker you know is ‘hesitation/appeal to
common knowledge’ – in most genres this counts for at least 30 per cent of all
occurrences, and amongst the young speakers in the UWE Role-play, this
proportion rises to 74 per cent. The 50 per cent propositional uses in the
Educational genre are initially surprising. However, in educational contexts,
the core meaning ‘knowledge’ is of course a fundamental part of what con-
versation is about, with examples such as ‘do you know what soot is?’; ‘you
know five add five’; ‘let’s see if you think you know what it is’; ‘you know what
to do’. The Institutional genre, too, has a large proportion of propositional
usages, with speakers frequently checking factual knowledge in courts of law,
for example. Impositional you know is most common in the Business genre
where speakers attempt to persuade their opposite numbers of the validity of
their arguments, by appealing to consensual truths. We would expect higher
rates of you know usage overall to be reflected in higher D-values, and this is
globally correct, except for the Educational genre, where, as noted above, the
emphasis on factual knowledge is paramount. In other respects, the D-value
reduces progressively from left to right of the table, with higher frequencies
overall being reflected in larger numbers of pragmatic marking usages.
5.3 Sociolinguistic features
5.3.1 Introduction
The participants in Watt’s (1989) study (1989: 232) consider that overuse of
you know is ‘a kind of mannerism . . . a fashion . . . habit’ and that ‘with some
people “you know” comes in every sentence’. Watts studied both the attitudes
expressed and the actual usage of a range of markers in 11 minutes 21.6 seconds
of speech including well, right, now, you know, I mean, anyway, that’s right and
I see. He comes to the interesting conclusion (1989: 226) that ‘the perceptual
salience of a discourse marker is correlated with its use as a right-hand
discourse bracket’ and claims (p. 227) that when self-styled educated speakers
evaluate the speech habits of others, they have a tendency to ‘attach symbolic
significance to discourse markers so that they can be used as linguistic out-
group features’. Stubbe and Holmes (1995), in their study of the social varia-
tion of you know ‘and other exasperating expressions’ in New Zealand, found
that, while gender did not appear to have any impact on the frequency of you
know amongst middle-class speakers, this is not the case with younger speakers:
young male working-class speakers use you know much more than their female
counterparts. Macaulay (2002) found, on the contrary, in his quantitative
5.3 Sociolinguistic features 107
sociolinguistic study of Scottish data, that women were more likely to use you
know than men. Drawing on the COLT Corpus recorded in 1993 in various
school districts in and around London and the LLC, recorded between 1960 and
1975, Erman (2001) found that young speakers use you know differently from
older speakers and suggests that you know is undergoing further pragmaticalisa-
tion in a process of ongoing change. You know appears to be used for particular
purposes by politicians (not just as ‘sound fillers’) and we will be having a look
at why.
This section will present an analysis of the distributional frequency of you
know in utterance-initial, medial and final positions in the BNC and other
spoken corpus data.
It will also report on attitudes to you know expressed by younger and older
respondents in the modified matched-guise test/focus group investigation in
the UK.
5.3.2 ‘Macro’ categories: social class, gender and age of speaker

The robust data in the BNC indicate that there is some difference in rates of
you know across the different class strata. The values in the ‘Sig.’ column in
Table 5.3 show the statistical significance of the difference between each row
and that immediately below it. The table reveals that the highest rates are in the
C1 and C2 groups with lower rates in the AB and DE classes, and significant
differences between AB and C1 and C2 and DE – but not between C1 and C2.
In a more fine-grained analysis of the functions of you know according
to class, Zheng (2012: 146) found that the AB speakers used you know in
initial and medial positions the most, while the unskilled DE speakers used this
marker most in final positions. Macaulay (2002: 765) also found that ‘middle-
class speakers are more likely to use you know medially in an utterance for
purposes of self-repair or elaboration’. DE speakers tended to use you know
finally, as a means of engaging their interlocutor in the interaction and prompt-
ing a response, as we see in examples (5.9)–(5.11):
Table 5.3. The distributional frequency of you know in the BNC according to
social class
Tokens of
Class Number of speakers you know Word count Rate per 10,000 words Sig.
AB 67 (86 in all) (78%) 2,328 716,328 32.5 p<.001

C1 98 (114 in all) (86%) 2,845 782,234 36.37 Not sig.
C2 73 (99 in all) (74%) 2,603 719,884 36.15 p<.001
DE 46 (59 in all) (78%) 1,280 451,485 30.91
108 You know
Table 5.4. The distributional frequency of you know in the BNC according to
gender
Tokens of
Gender Number of speakers you know Word count Rate per 10,000 words Sig.
Male 335 (509 in all) (66%) 5,206 1,454,344 35.8 not sig.
Female 406/559 (73%) 8,230 2,264,094 36.35
(5.9) Oh a stall of mixed each you know? (Response: No I think he provides game
as well)
(5.10) All you have to do is pull it off, they do come off you know? (R: Yeah but I
can’t be doing with it)
(5.11) Well yes they’ve got the black furniture you know (R: They’ve got the
furniture [unclear] of course, yes.)
As we can see from Table 5.4, though a larger proportion of the female
speakers use you know and the rate of usage is slightly higher, the difference in
raw occurrences is not statistically significant. Zheng (2012) looks at position
in the utterance – initial, medial and final – and suggests that females tend to use
you know more than males as an attention-getter at the beginning of an
utterance. She also detected a pattern of medial usage in female speakers
with ‘emotion + you know + explanation’, in which you know signals a
transition from personal feelings to fact description. Males, on the other
hand, tended to use you know to correct or describe something that they were
not quite certain about, especially in conjunction with sort of, like, stuff, just
and filled pauses. This chimes with the results reported in Holmes (1986: 17)
that ‘men used you know more frequently than women to signal the fact that the
message was imprecisely or unsatisfactorily encoded’.
These findings about the gender-linked functional variation of you know echo
Erman’s (2001) functional taxonomy in a very interesting and possibly signifi-
cant way. As tabulated in Section 5.2 above, Erman (2001: 1341) divided the
functions of you know into text monitors (discourse markers and editing markers,
including repair markers and hesitation markers), social markers (interactive
markers, including turn-regulators and comprehension-securing markers) and
metalinguistic monitors (approximators, hedges and emphasisers). Erman found
that the older speakers in the LLC used you know to a far greater extent than the
younger speakers for text-editing to signal repair and hesitation, rather than to
ensure listener involvement, which was a feature of the younger speakers in the
COLT. On the basis of this comparison of different generations of speakers,
Erman (2001) suggests that you know is evolving from text-editing to more social
and metalinguistic functions. The fact that the females used you know to a greater
extent than the males for more pragmaticalised usages may provide some support
for Labov’s (1990) suggestion that females tend to be in the vanguard of

linguistic change. We cannot assert this with any certainty, however, firstly
because the generation-difference may be a case of age-grading (in other
words, speakers change their modes of speech as they get older) and secondly
because the gender-related differences may be related to the ‘types of talk’
indulged in by males and females, rather than to the sensitivity of females to
linguistic change. In other words, females may tend to talk about emotional
matters more and would therefore use you know in such contexts, while males
may tend to talk more about factual matters and would, therefore, use you know
to flag up repairs relating to lexical choices.
If you know were undergoing semantic bleaching and pragmaticalisation, we
would expect it to be more frequent (as it can be used in an increasing number
of contexts). Erman (2001) does not appear to find differences in rates of
occurrence of you know in the LLC and COLT corpora, in the older and younger
generations of speakers – this is something which we can investigate, too, in the
different age-groups of speakers in the BNC.
Table 5.5 shows the rate of occurrence of you know according to different
age-groups.
Apart from the hiccup in the data for the 35–44-year-olds, what we see here is
a steady increase in the frequency of you know as the age of the speakers
increases. The youngest speakers have the lowest rates of you know usage and
even the 15–24-year-olds (similar in age-group to those in the COLT Corpus) do
not attain the rates of usage of the 60+ age-group. It is noticeable that only 53 per
cent of the 0–14-year-olds use you know at all, compared with 82 per cent of the
60+-year-olds. This rise in the proportion of speakers who use you know is
echoed in the increased rate of occurrence across the age-groups. It seems that
you know usage is learnt as you grow older. Zheng (2012) reports that speakers in
the 0–14 group used you know as a discourse marker the least and there are
numerous non-discourse marker uses in this group, such as ‘do you know’, ‘as
Table 5.5. The distributional frequency of you know in the BNC according
to age
Tokens of
Age Number of speakers you know Word count Rate per 10,000 words Sig.
0–14 107 (201 in all) (53%) 996 355,673 28 p<.001

15–24 138 (211 in all) (65%) 1,625 500,619 32.45 p<.001
25–34 121 (163 in all) (74%) 2,531 690,720 36.64 p<.01
35–44 113 (147 in all) (77%) 2,361 705,882 33.45 p<.001
45–59 113 (153 in all) (74%) 2,868 733,141 39.12 p<.001
60+ 116 (142 in all) (82%) 2,874 671,392 42.81
110 You know
Table 5.6. Distributional frequency of you know in different genres in

the British National Corpus
Genre Rate per 10,000 words Tokens Word count
1 S_interv_oral 54.55 4,359 798,978

2 S_consult 53.98 709 131,354
3 S_demonstratn 45.25 138 30,500
4 S_lect_socsci 40.59 628 154,718
5 S_conv 38.70 15,529 4,012,457
6 S_tutorial 37.58 522 138,888
7 S_interview 33.83 403 119,117
8 S_spch-script 30.83 1,384 448,810
9 S_lect_arts 27.33 136 49,759
10 S_unclass 26.75 1,088 406,702
Legend:
S_interv_oral: oral history interview
S_consult: consultations (e.g. doctor)
S_demonstratn: spontaneous speech – demonstration (of e.g. product)
S_lect_socsci: (university) social science lecture
S_conv: everyday spontaneous conversation
S_tutorial: spontaneous speech, (university) tutorial
S_interview: spontaneous speech – general interview
S_spch-script: scripted speech
S_lect_arts: (university) arts lecture
S_unclass: unclassified spontaneous speech
you know’, ‘you know it’ and so on, the highest number of non-discourse marker
uses across all age-groups. Macaulay (2002: 753) points out that, in peer con-
versations, the use of you know ‘does not seem to be well established at the age of
fourteen’. Even if we accept that beginning to use more pragmaticalised forms of
you know is something which is learnt with age, however, the apparent-time data
provide no evidence that pragmatic marker you know is an incoming form. It is
most used by the oldest speakers in the data and appears to be well-established.
5.3.3 Situational variation in the use of you know

The ten genres with the highest frequencies of you know are displayed in
Table 5.6.
Surprisingly, rates of you know, unlike well, are not highest in spontaneous
conversation. Indeed, conversation is fifth on the list with much lower rates of
occurrence than in oral history interviews and consultations, and somewhat
lower rates than demonstrations and social science lectures.
The very high rates of occurrence of you know in the oral history interviews
requires some explanation. One reason for it may be that older speakers are
generally chosen for such interviews because of their memories of times past.
We have noted above that older speakers tend to use you know to a greater
extent than younger speakers. This does not explain all the variance here,
however, as rates of occurrence for older speakers (60+) is 43 per 10,000
words and the rate is 54 per 10,000 words in the oral history interviews.
Extract (5.12) may provide some clues:
(5.12) Then (pause) when I took er you’d (pause) you could take a proficiency test
which was held at, at your Company Headquarters by a visiting officer and
erm (pause) I then, we’d, by then we’d had some American weapons come,
one was the Browning automatic which is a very very good (pause) good er
weapon, you could r– fire single shots or rapid shots. It was the American
equivalent to the Bren gun only it, it was more like a rifle, it hadn’t got a
stand, you know, more like a rifle butt, you know. And I, I was issued with
that and er I took (pause) lessons on it up at head– at headquarters and then
when I took me proficiency test, I was asked questions on the Browning
automatic and (pause) other ap– things appertaining to the army and I passed
me proficiency test. That’s the certificate which I regret now (pause) is with
South Staffs museum at Lichfield.
BNC, S_interv_oral_history, F8P
The oral history interview genre is at once an informal conversational genre
but one in which the interviewee is expected to take the floor in an extended
monologue to tell their story. In (5.12), we see only part of the speaker’s
extended turn. The two examples of you know serve functions which are
familiar from Section 5.2, calling on the interviewer to co-construct an under-
standing of the Browning automatic rifle. In ‘it hadn’t got a stand you know
more like a rifle butt you know’, the first you know can be interpreted as an
introduction to a clarification. The final you know suggests that the interviewer
may share the interviewee’s understanding of different types of guns, or could
serve as an approximator – ‘you know the sort of thing’. Schiffrin (1987: 281)
suggests that ‘y’know also occurs when a hearer is invited to share in the
information transfer being accomplished through narrative discourse’.
Utterance-final usages are quite common in the oral history interviews,
punctuating these personal narratives and explanations with a ‘nod’ to the
interviewer in order to engage them in further listening.
Consultations, too, contain the whole gamut of functions of you know. What
appears to characterise the use of you know here, however, and which might
explain the extensive use of it, is that, in a consultation, one person is the expert
and one the consultee. In such situations, both parties attempt to establish some
kind of consensual knowledge, the consultee in explaining what the problem is
and the adviser in enjoining the understanding of the consultee in the advice
being given. Extract (5.13) illustrates the particular role of the adviser in a
Careers Guidance interview:
112 You know
(5.13) (SP:PS2MX) Right.

(SP:PS2MW) and, and if those are bad or not supportive enough or actually
destructive,
(SP:PS2MX) Mm.
(SP:PS2MW) then n– you know they can’t cope with it. And, and, and it’s
getting the idea of how that works (pause) is very important. Now you, you
can do that in all sorts of ways.
(SP:PS2MX) Mm.
(SP:PS2MW) Erm and er I think, I think that’s one of the most important
things. And also how erm if you are a, a helper (pause) what sort of pressures
that puts on you. You know, what sort of emotional stuff they try and dump
on you,
(SP:PS2MX) Mm.
(SP:PS2MW) and, and what do you do about it, you know whe– when they
er y– you know, I mean, I mean I think one of the things is you, you can start
off erm you know very open and so on, but if you’re not careful y– y– you
actually take on responsibility for them (pause) you know in a, in a way which
is actually not helpful
BNC S_consult HDY
Like the oral history interviewee, the consultant is in a position of greater
knowledge by comparison with the consultee. This consultation is more dialo-
gual in appearance than the extract from the oral history interview in (5.12) but
the consultee in actual fact simply gives the backchannel signal ‘Mm’ in
response to a series of pieces of advice punctuated by you know. It seems,
once again, that, by using you know, the ‘expert’ wishes to engage the listener in
what s/he is saying by suggesting that the novice shares some of the knowledge
already, thus downplaying his expertise and creating a more level floor.
In the demonstration genre, a similar focus on knowledge-based transfer can
be detected and, in some examples, as in (5.14), you know is used in its literal
meaning, not as a pragmatic marker, but to punctuate a check-list of previous
knowledge. The extract is from a British Red Cross First Aid course:
(5.14) . . . pulmonary artery comes back into the heart, the pulmonary vein goes away
from the heart
(SP:F8DPSUNK) . . . vein goes home
(SP:PS1P9) back up to the lungs, they are linking the heart and the lungs
(SP:F8DPSUNK) Yeah, I’ve written that down
(SP:F8DPSUNK)(unclear)
(SP:PS1P9) alright and if you look at the diagram on page thirteen and you
look at the little arrow diagram you’ll see that it gives it quite nice and clearly
there (pause) is that alright? Just wanted to clarify that little point, so you
know the organs that make up the circulatory system, you know how to check
it, you know the one slight difference than what you normally expect veins
and arteries to be doing (pause) okay? Now we need to talk a little bit about
what happens when the veins or the arteries or the capillaries for that matter,
the veins, the arteries or the capillaries have a leak in them, they become
broken, now you already know that the circulatory system is a closed system
and that the blood can only do its job if it’s being transported within that
system
BNC, S_demonstration F8D
In instructional contexts such as we find in the demonstration genre, prag-
matic marking usages are common in hesitating, introducing clarifications and
explanations, but there are also a larger proportion of literal usages to do with
states of knowledge. In a succession of three items introduced by you know the
instructor checks that the learner has remembered the key points.
The core semantics of you know suggest that the speaker wishes to claim
some area of common knowledge with the hearer. This has a double-edged
quality, as hearers may accept and be grateful for such a claim, regarding it as
an act of positive politeness or, alternatively, find the claim pushy or invasive,
an intrusion on their territory, a face-threatening act. These polar attitudes to
you know were explored using the attitudinal questionnaire, the results of which
are reported in Section 5.3.3.
5.3.4 Attitudes to you know

In Section 5.3.1, some significant correlations were noted between particular
social characteristics, rates of occurrence and usages of you know. You know is
used to a lesser extent by the more professional classes than by the more lower-
middle classes. The unskilled working class does not use it more than other
classes but it tends to be used in the final (right-hand) position. It is used slightly
more by women (in initial and medial positions) than by men, and it is heavily
used by speakers in the 60+ age-group. Watts (1989) detected a certain level of
stigmatisation of you know and related it to its ‘right-hand’ usage, which he
claims is more salient than in other positions. This section reports the results of
the modified matched-guise test employed to gauge attitudinal factors with
respect to the inclusion or non-inclusion of you know in a right-peripheral
position.
In the modified matched-guise investigation of you know, respondents were
asked to complete the Likert scales about the use of you know in the example
given in Box 5.1.
The limitations of the questionnaire require us to take considerable caution in
drawing any conclusions. Firstly, we can only make any generalisation about
right-hand you know (and not initial or medial usages in any of their many
functions). Secondly, the example sentence given is perhaps misleading, as
calling someone stupid is ipso facto impolite, so this may have biased respon-
dents. Clearly, a great deal more research is needed to clarify attitudes to you
114 You know
BOX 5.1
Read the following and think about the difference between the statement
with you know and the one without you know. Do you feel more posi-
tively disposed towards Speaker A or Speaker B? What difference does
using you know make?
speaker a: They obviously thought he was a bit stupid.

speaker b: They obviously thought he was a bit stupid, you know.
Compared with Speaker A (without you know), Speaker B is more:
polite 1 2 3 4 5 impolite
direct 1 2 3 4 5 indirect
educated 1 2 3 4 5 not educated
friendly 1 2 3 4 5 Unfriendly
Table 5.7. Average attitudinal scores for you know on the Likert
scales, with modes in brackets
Polite Direct Educated Friendly
you know 3 (3) 3 (4) 3 (4) 3 (3)
know when it is used in different positions in the utterance and in different

contexts. The attitudinal scores for you know are displayed in Table 5.7.
Respondents’ attitudes to right-hand you know do not highlight it as being
salient or sociolinguistically stigmatised overall. The medians and modes for
‘polite’ and ‘friendly’ are all ‘3’, which means that respondents generally felt
that the inclusion of you know made little difference to how polite or impolite,
friendly or unfriendly the speaker sounded. The means for ‘direct’ and ‘edu-
cated’ are also ‘3’ but the modes are 4, meaning that the response most often
selected was ‘4’ indicating that respondents felt right-hand you know renders
the utterance slightly more indirect and uneducated than the version without
you know.
Table 5.8 shows the differences between the attitudinal scores of the younger
(university undergraduate) group with the older (book-group/choir members).
This shows that the older respondents (members of the choir and book-
group) differed from the younger group on only one factor – education. The
Table 5.8. Average attitudinal scores for you know in younger and older
respondents
you know – you know – you know – you know –

polite direct educated friendly
Mean Mean Mean Mean
Group 1 = Students; 1 3 3 3 3
2 = Choir/book-group 2 3 3 4 3
older respondents considered the version with right-hand you know to be

marginally less educated than that without you know. This difference in attitude
is statistically significant at the 0.01 level, confirming Watt’s (1989) finding that
you know is socially stigmatised by the older generation. What we cannot say is
whether attitudes to you know are changing or whether this is an age-graded
phenomenon, in other words, whether the younger undergraduate population
will begin to stigmatise you know as they grow older, or whether this is a real
change in attitude. The paradox is that older speakers actually use you know
more than younger speakers (though perhaps not those in the professional
classes), as we have found in the BNCWebsurvey. You know is used uncon-
sciously by speakers – but when their attention is drawn to it, they may
stigmatise it and use it as a means of designating an outgroup.
Why then are occurrences of you know so frequent in politicians’ speech?
Peters (2012: 17) reports on the frequency with which Barack Obama uses you
know in the following terms:
. . . Have you ever caught yourself abusing ‘you know’? Then you will sympathise with
Barack Obama, who managed to use ‘you know’ fifty-two times in just one interview, the
one with ABC News correspondent Robin Roberts in which he endorsed gay marriage.
Tony Blair’s use of y’know is infamous, as we can see in the following
extract from a parliamentary sketch-writer in 2012:
(5.15) Sketch: Tony Blair falls into, y’know, the old routine
By Michael Deacon, Parliamentary Sketchwriter
5:56PM GMT 18 December 2012
Although he kept protesting, always with a beam of self-
deprecation, that he was ‘out of practice’ at facing the press, he soon
fell into, look, y’know, the old rhythms (imploring arms, open palms,
smile spread like warm butter).
Though you know may be used by politicians for the same functions as for
others in everyday conversation and interviews, to hesitate while searching for
116 You know
words, as an attention-getting feature or to evoke consensuality, it seems likely

that it is also used as a third-order indexical.
‘Societal informalisation’, according to Fairclough (2003: 224), has led to a
tendency in the most developed liberal societies for relations of power and
authority to be implicit, and for interaction where such relations obtain to
become more informal. Politicians in particular want to present themselves as
‘ordinary’ (not the elite, public-school/Oxbridge-educated people they gener-
ally are). By using y’know, Blair indexes a relaxed, informal and ordinary
persona, in touch with the ordinary voter. As suggested in Chapter 1 (in
Table 1.3), you know is used amongst intimates. It comes to be heard as ‘sharing
common knowledge’, which comes to index ‘we are intimates who share
background information’. Politicians use you know to claim intimacy with
their electorate and to signal that they share consensual views with them.
5.4 Historical semantic change

It is probably the case, as Schiffrin (1987: 267) comments, that, along with I
mean, you know is one of the markers ‘whose literal meanings directly influ-
ence their discourse use’. However, the fact that you know is often phonetically
reduced, as indicated in the orthographic formulation y’know (or y’ken in
Scotland, see Macaulay 2002), indicates that semantic change is occurring.
As far as I know, although synchronic studies have investigated the poly-
semy of you know and the development of less propositional meanings, no
previous study has systematically traced the historical development of you
know with any time-depth. This section will report the results of the analysis
made of occurrences of you know in the Old Bailey Trial Corpus and will end
with an evaluation of the impact of interactional factors in its semantic
evolution.
Brinton (1996: 206–210) notes that, in the Middle English period, the
‘common knowledge’ use of hwaet comes to be denoted by a variety of
parenthetical clauses which are the ancestors of Modern English you know.
She suggests (1996: 209) that, ‘while these parentheticals may derive from
subject-main verb sequences, with or without that, [. . . .], it is more likely that
they derive from adjoined clauses with anaphoric demonstratives or relatives’.
She gives the following examples from Chaucer, reproduced here as examples
5.16 and 5.17:
(5.16) The Miller is a cherl; ye know wel this.
‘The Miller is a churl; you know well this.’
(5.17) Ne no thing asketh so gret attendaunces/ As doth youre lay, and that knowe
all ye.”
‘Nor does anything ask such great attention as does your religion, and all of
you know that.’
5.4 Historical semantic change 117
Brinton (1996: 244) provides further discussion of the syntactic develop-

ment from the main clause (You know (that) . . .) to adjunct or parenthetical
status (. . .you know) where there is a reversal of the relationship of subordina-
tion from, for example, I feel that Max is a Martian to Max is a Martian, I feel.
Ross (1973) argues for a process of ‘slifting’ or sentence lifting ‘which moves
the that clause from under the domination of I feel and adjoins it to the left of
the erstwhile superordinate clause; a further rule of “niching” [. . .] moves the
parenthetical into clause-medial position’. Thompson and Mulac (1991: 313),
on the other hand, argue, on the basis of synchronic data, that, as I think occurs
far more frequently without that than with it, it is the blurring of the distinction
between main and complement clause that gives rise to the epistemic parenthe-
ticals. Brinton does not find evidence to support this hypothesis in Middle
English. She argues that the parentheticals are more likely to develop from the
parentheticals with anaphoric reference that we have seen in examples (5.16)
and (5.17) (you know wel this and that know all ye) and provides numerous
examples of these from the Middle English period. There is a further type of
(medial and final) parenthetical introduced by as which is also prevalent (as I
gesse, I trowe so, as it semeth me, as it thynketh me, as that me thynketh). She
therefore argues that it is the anaphoric demonstrative ‘that’ which is elided in
the development of parentheticals, not the relativising ‘that’ posited by Ross
(1973) or the ‘blurring’ of the main and complement clause proposed by
Thompson and Mulac (1991). She suggests the following stages (Brinton,
1996: 252):
Stage I: They are poisonous. That I think.
Stage II: They are poisonous, {that I think, I think that/it. as/ so I think}. =
‘which I think’.
Stage III: They are poisonous, I think. OR
They are poisonous, as I think. = ‘as far as I think, probably’
Stage IV: I think, they are poisonous. They are, I think, poisonous.
Brinton notes that the relation of syntactic to semantic change is somewhat
difficult to establish for I think and it seems to be the case that the different
functions of you know in initial, medial and final positions may derive from a
complex interaction of the semantics of you know with interactional require-
ments. The argument pursued below is based on data from the Old Bailey
Corpus, which gives us a (somewhat imperfect) picture of the English spoken
from 1674 to 1913. As the data in the Old Bailey Corpus start only at 1674,
there is a substantial gap to be filled between the data presented by Brinton for
Middle English and data for the late seventeenth century, which we have access
to in the Old Bailey Corpus, and scope for further investigation.
The OED can be taken as a stepping-off point in tracing the historical
development of you know. It proposes three main functions of the colloquial
118 You know
use of you know, a parenthetical usage, which implies shared knowledge, a

questioning usage and a temporising usage, as follows:
(a) Used parenthetically, usually following the main statement (frequently
with emphatic, persuasive, or reproving intent): as you know (or may like
to or should know) is the case. Similarly (now archaic and rare) thou
knowest.
†(4b) Following a question: do you know? Obsolete.
(c) Used to temporise, while the speaker considers how to continue, or
simply as a conversational filler. Cf. you know what I mean.
www.oed.com, ‘you know’.
The first attestation of the parenthetical usage given in the OED is from 1375,
that for the questioning you know?, is from 1712 and that for the temporising
usage from 1824. These usages are clearly distinguishable from their position
in the utterance, final in the case of the first two and medial in the case of the
temporising usage. Parenthetical and questioning functions are distinguishable
through their intonation, falling for (a) and rising for (b).
The raw number of hits for you know in the Old Bailey Proceedings is 20,371.
It was clearly impossible to analyse every occurrence and samples were drawn
across the data chronologically, as outlined in Section 2.7.2. Because proposi-
tional uses of you know are so frequent in the data, particularly the ‘(How) do/did
you know. . .?’ questions posed by prosecutors, it was necessary to survey a
larger number of instances than for some of the other markers to detect any
pragmatic marking usages. Fifty occurrences were analysed for 8 time periods.
What is remarkable is that it is in the earliest period that we see the largest
proportion of non-canonical and potentially pragmatic marking usages of
you know. All examples surveyed from 1763 onwards were found to be non-
pragmatic marking usages. This may be a reflection of the increasing formality
and ‘objectivity’ of the reporting of the Proceedings as time went on, described in
Section 2.7.2.
The first instance of you know in the Old Bailey Corpus (1674–1913) which
might be interpreted as a pragmatic marking usage is from 1722 and is
utterance-initial.
(5.18) Matth.ias Brinsden, of St. Ann Blackfriars, was indicted for the Murder of
Hannah his Wife, by giving her with a Knife one mortal Wound under the Left
Pap, of the length of 1 Inch, and depth of 6 Inches, on the 16th of July last, of
which Wound she instantly dy’d. He was a 2d time indicted on the Coroner’s
Inquisition for the said Murder. Hannah Brinsdon depos’d, that about 9 at
Night, her Mother (the Deseas’d) sitting on the Bed, and suckling her Child,
ask’d her Father (the prisoner) what she should have for Supper? he answer’d,
Bread and Cheese, can’t you eat that as well as the Children? No, says she, I
4
† = obsolete
want a bit of Meat. I have no Money to buy you any says he. You know, says
the Deceased, I have had, but little to day. D . . . n ye, ye Bitch, says the
prisoner, I’ll stick ye the next Word that ye speak. The Deceas’d again askt for
Meat, and then the prisoner pushed her back with his Left Hand, and stab’d
her under the Breast with the Knife which he had in his Right Hand. This
Evidence seeing the Blood flow so fast from her Mother, ran and took the
Child from her Breast; and her elder Sister Betty, crying, Lord Father, you
have murder’d my Mother! he swore, D . . . n, ye Bitches, hold your Tongues,
or I’ll stick you too.
Brinsden, Killing, 1722.
I have included the fuller context of this somewhat unedifying tale to shed
light on the function of the instance of you know. Because of the interpolated
‘says the Deceased’, the utterance-initial you know appears to be comma-d off
from the rest of the utterance and to function potentially as an attention-getter.
Closer inspection reveals that what might be considered to be an attention-
getting usage is interpretable as a full propositional usage, whereby the
‘deceased’ claims that the addressee knows something (but with the emphatic,
persuasive or reproving intent highlighted by the OED). The deceased’s words
as reported are ‘You know I have had but little [to eat] today’, in other words,
although you know is used in a syntactically canonical way, albeit without the
relative ‘that’, it is used rhetorically to invoke common knowledge as a means
of persuasion, or to reproach the addressee. The prisoner’s violent reaction
testifies to the strength of the reproof.
This propositional and ungrammaticalised use of you know as a means of
persuasion is found very frequently in the early eighteenth-century data, as we
can see in examples 5.19–5.21.
(5.19) he seeing the Deceas’d drawing his Sword, did draw his own, that after the
Deceas’d had receiv’d the Wound, he said to him, you know it is not of my
seeking, he answered no, and bid them let him go.
Gerald Fitzgerald, Killing > murder, 28th February 1730.
(5.20) and the Prisoner said to the Deceas’d, you know my Temper, why do you
provoke me? That the Deceas’d answer’d, must I be subject to your Humour?
Richard Cooper, Killing > murder, 28th April 1731.
(5.21) I’ll assure you I did not ravish her, any otherwise than by talking her over, and
making her drink, as a Man must always do in such Cases; for you know a
Woman must be coax’d a little, though she’s never so willing
John Ellis, Sexual Offences > rape, 8th December 1731.
In each of these cases, the speakers enjoin the addressee’s understanding or
knowledge of the speakers themselves (examples (5.18), (5.19) and (5.20)) or
draw on common or consensual knowledge (5.21) in order to advance their
argument. You know followed by a noun (my Temper in (5.20)) or by a fully
formed clause (‘it is not of my seeking’ in (5.19) and ‘a Woman must be coaxed
120 You know
a little’ in (5.21)) is in initial position in these cases. In the case where it is

followed by a noun, you know could not be omitted, and can thus be unequi-
vocally interpreted as a propositional usage. In the other cases, where it is the
preface to a fully formed clause, you know could be omitted with no loss of
sense. It is perhaps this, coupled with the rhetorical function which you know
serves as an appeal to the addressee, which allows it to develop a more
intersubjective function in which KNOWLEDGE is backgrounded and
APPEAL is foregrounded, in the type of Figure-Ground shift which Waltereit
(2006) posits for diciamo in Italian (see Section 1.6.2, Tables 1.4 and 1.5).
Indeed, in examples (5.18), (5.19) and (5.21), there is potential Figure-Ground
ambiguity, which heralds the semantic shift whereby you know is no longer
associated with knowledge so much as with the appeal that it makes to the
addressee.
Examples (5.22) and (5.23) illustrate the use of you know as an appeal to
consensual knowledge, in final and medial positions, respectively.
(5.22) Margaret Williams. I have laid Mrs. Rodes of five Children, but I don’t know
what sort of a House she keeps, for I never looked into it; for my Business is to
be here and there, and everywhere, you know.
Elizabeth Gammer, Mary Rodes, Violent Theft > robbery, 14th January 1732.
(5.23) Prisoner. As for the Pistol and Powder, I can give a good Account how I came
by them. I was Cook of a Ship, that was just come from New-England, in
Company with another Ship, and our Captain invited the other Captain on
board our Ship, and that Captain brought his Cook with him; and this Cook
was more expert than I, in taking, and telling Stories and singing a Song, and
besides, he could dance, and tumble, and play twenty Tricks to make
Diversion; and your Captains, you know loe to have their Frolicks when they
are at Sea. So that this Captain set great Store by this Cook, and this Cook took
a great liking to me, and say he, Let’s take some Cartridges of Powder, and
make Wildfire to run about the Streets, for the Glory of God, that we are come
safe to old England; and so I came by this Powder, sweet Jesus Almighty
knows it to be true.
William Sidwell, Violent Theft > highway robbery, 28th June 1733.
In both cases, the use of the consensual you know advances the speaker’s
defence of their position. Margaret Williams defends the fact that she did not
have a close knowledge of Mrs Rode’s house because, as a mid wife, she was
always rushing off to deliver the next baby. Her listeners are invited to under-
stand, through their knowledge of her profession, that she would be ‘here and
there, and everywhere, you know’. The prisoner’s appeal to his listeners in
(5.24) that ‘Captains, you know loe [love] to have their Frolicks when they are
at Sea’ is perhaps a less convincing defence for procuring some ‘Cartridges of
Powder’. His use of you know is clearly a strategic use in an attempt to persuade
his listeners that his actions were justifiable.
This strategic use of consensual you know is even more clearly felt in (5.24)
where a condemned man has written a verse to exculpate himself from what he
has done.
(5.24) The following Lines, was sound in the above said Malefactors Cell; which
shews the Stupidity and hardness of these unthinking and miserable
Creatures, although under Sentence of Death.
Poverty God D-n you, what makes you (haunt me so,
I han’t one Grigg to help my self you know:
Neither Shirt, Shoe, nor Hose,
For I have pawn’d my Cloaths:
I han’t a Coat upon my Back,
No, nor by G-d but half a Hat,
Both Day and Night, thus Maxims runs,
Forc’d to Eat dry crusts, instead of butter’d Buns.
Ordinary’s Account, 24th May 1736.
Occurrences of you know sampled between 1784 and 1912 were all proposi-
tional, reflecting the question and answer nature of courtroom proceedings with
a high frequency of ‘Do/Did you know. . .?’
It is not until 1912 in the Old Bailey Proceedings that we find the following
example of you know functioning as a marker of consensual knowledge, in its
customary final position:
(5.25) ‘I looked for you last night and could not find you. What do you want to lock
my girls up for?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He replied, ‘Well, business is
business, you know. I don’t want to be bad friends. Take this,’ producing two
two-shilling pieces and one shilling, ‘and I will bring you out a drink.’
JOSEPH STRAW, Miscellaneous > perverting justice, 2nd July 1912.
Once again, you know is strategic and rhetorical in the context, implying that
the speaker and hearer share a common understanding of the situation, albeit in
rather elliptical terms.
Finally, in the 1913 sample, we find evidence of the clarificatory use of
medial you know with an attendant appeal to the addressee’s understanding,
which we see in example (5.26):
(5.26) I said ‘This is rather dangerous ground you are treading, Harry.’ He said,
‘Yes, but there will be no violence or murder, I bar that sort of thing, you
know, just a little shake up or a hustle.’ I do not know exactly the words, but
it meant that.
HENRY THOMAS STANLEY, Violent Theft > robbery, 7th January 1913.
Harry is reported as drawing the line at violence, but not ‘you know’ being
averse to ‘a little shake up’. It is interesting that the speaker himself remarks on
metalinguistic factors, to not knowing the exact words, which may suggest a
122 You know
usage akin to the ‘word search and appeal to the interlocutor to fill in the gap’
which we have seen in Section 5.2.2.
In summarising this section on the historical development of contemporary
usages of pragmatic-marking you know, it is necessary to highlight the fact that
we do not have a great deal of evidence on which to build from the Old Bailey
Corpus. Further investigations of the Late Middle English and Early Modern
periods may bring greater illumination. What we can say on the basis of Brinton’s
earlier research and the rather slender evidence from 1674 onwards in the Old
Bailey Corpus is that pragmatic marker you know appears to have developed
from clause-final parentheticals, which can then appear both initially and medi-
ally. The function of pragmatic marker you know draws very heavily on its two
canonical core elements: the second-person pronoun you is heavily addressee-
oriented, calling listeners’ attention and enjoining them with the second element
know to share a common understanding or knowledge. The scribes who created
The Old Bailey Corpus are unlikely to have included false starts, repetitions and
recasts, and we cannot exclude the possibility that temporising usages of you
know developed from an early stage but simply not in evidence here. What we do
perceive in the examples is the strategic use of you know to appeal to consensual
truths as a means of reinforcing an argument. This may lead to a Figure-Ground
shift whereby the semantics of the cognitive verb KNOW is backgrounded and
the strategic elements APPEAL and SHARED UNDERSTANDING are fore-
grounded, as displayed in Table 5.9
In time, the weight of the cognitive verb KNOW is reduced and it is the
strategic force which is retained, that is, the appeal for shared understanding.
This shift to a more fully pragmaticalised, de-verbal and lexicalised form,
sometimes written as y’know, is displayed in Table 5.10.
Table 5.9. Figure-Ground shift (modelled on Waltereit 2006: 68)
you know you know appeal/shared understanding
(thing said) ‘you’ + cognitive verb ‘know’ figure ground

thing meant Appeal/ shared understanding ground figure
Table 5.10. Verb-form reanalysis: y’know (modelled on Waltereit 2006: 69)
y’ know you know appeal/shared understanding
(thing heard) y’know figure ground

thing understood Appeal/ shared understanding ground Figure
In a more synchronic investigation of the grammaticalisation of you know,

Vincent et al. (2009) argue that certain functions of you know are more
grammaticalised than others, namely where it introduces new viewpoints or
pieces of information, as a marker of the speaker’s will to impose their view-
point, or as an emphasising marker. In these cases, you know has apparently lost
its function to mark a piece of information as already known, but is used
rhetorically (as we have seen in the ‘consensual’ function presented in
Section 5.2.7). The study conducted by Vincent et al. is a synchonic one,
based on an analysis of two interviews taken from CNN’s Larry King Live
programme where they found that 75 per cent of all the occurrences of you
know did not refer to shared knowledge. The Larry King Live programme
features interviews in which protagonists attempt to win arguments and, as the
authors themselves point out (2009: 224):
Television interviews corresponding to potentially more adversarial contexts than
casual conversations, it is thus not surprising that the incidence of those particular
uses of you know should be higher than hitherto recognized by prior studies on this
marker.
Vincent et al. interestingly found that the pitch prominence on know was
lower than that on you in all of the cases of discourse marking usage in their
corpus. They suggest that there is a move
from the representation of an addressee’s presupposed state of knowledge, to the hope that
this state of knowledge is indeed the case, and ultimately to the imposition of a state of
knowledge upon the addressee. Those possibilities correspond to three widespread values
of you know (Schiffrin 1987: 267–318): shared knowledge, appeal to co-speaker’s
empathy, and focus on the new information that the speaker wishes to impose on the
co-speaker as uncontroversial.
The gradual grammaticalisation (as Vincent et al. term it) of you know thus
moves from a referential and propositional reading, through subjectification
involving loss of truth-conditional meaning to a stage where the spatio-
temporal anchoring of you know is lost and its usage is interpersonal, with
control over the co-speaker. In this way, you know can be used utterance-
initially to introduce new information.
Given that you know has developed interactional and strategic functions
involving control over the co-speaker and the ability to introduce new informa-
tion, its development as a hesitation marker and pause-filler may appear
incongruous. It is, however, the appeal to shared understanding seen in Table
5.10 which can explain these usages. Once the Figure-Ground shift from the
semantic core cognitive verb meaning to ‘shared understanding’ has occurred,
and the strength of KNOW has bleached, the frequency of the item can rise and
it can be used in many more contexts to invoke consensuality and intersubjec-
tivity. In this sense, it can gain indexicality as an informal and friendly marker.
124 You know
Pragmatic enrichment
attention-getting
new information
self-evident fact/consensual truths/imposition/control over hearer
interpersonal
YOU + KNOW appeal to shared understanding word search/syntactic repair pause-filler
Core semantics semantically bleached
Figure 5.1 A synchronic/diachronic map of the polysemy of you know
However, you know can also have the more negative connotations of ‘control’,
as we have seen, which may explain why it is irritating if speakers (e.g.
politicians like Tony Blair) appear to claim common ground when you as the
addressee do not acknowledge it or sense it as imposed.
It is important to note that the old meanings of canonical YOU + KNOW and
you know do not disappear and that the different usages co-exist in a new
polysemy. The different senses have to be noted separately in the lexicon, a
factor which is reflected in the usages charted in sections 5.2.1–5.2.7. The
semantics of you know may be charted radially, along scales of semantic
bleaching and pragmatic enrichment, both of which arise out of the Figure-
Ground shift to interpersonal shared understanding. Figure 5.1 is an attempt to
capture this: the horizontal axis indicates the progressive semantic bleaching of
you know while the vertical axis shows the pragmatic enrichment which ensues
from the Figure-Ground shift.
5.5 Conclusion
All of the pragmatic marking functions of you know appear to be well-
established in contemporary spoken English. There is evidence in the Old
Bailey Corpus that even the impositional usage invoked by Vincent et al.
(2009) was current as early as 1730. Older speakers in the BNC use you know
to a far greater extent than younger speakers and thus apparent-time data
gives little credence to the suggestion that there is change in progress
(despite Erman’s 2001 findings about young people’s use of you know in
the COLT data).
The different positions of you know in the utterance – initial, medial and
final – tend to be associated with its different functions, attention-getting
occurring initially, editing and pause-filling occurring medially and the
5.5 Conclusion 125
evocation of consensual truths occurring finally, along with agreement-seeking

(when rising intonation tends to be used).
The different functions of you know are pressed into service variably across
different speech situations, and in different demographic groups. Narrative
discourse by older speakers in oral history interviews yields the highest fre-
quencies, closely followed by consultations and demonstrations in which
experts are passing on knowledge to laypersons and fictively suggesting that
the non-expert ‘knows’ in order to downplay their expertise and create a more
egalitarian floor. AB speakers tend to use you know in initial and medial
positions but use them less than C1 and C2 speakers. DE speakers use you
know least, but tend to use them in final positions to seek agreement. It is the
usage in final position which seems to be salient and to attract stigmatisation, as
you know in this position is perceived to be associated with a lack of education,
at least by older respondents.
A survey of the historical development of the rich polysemy of you know
provides valuable insights into the ways in which its core semantic elements –
the second-person pronoun + the cognitive verb KNOW – yield particular
implicatures, to do with both appeal and common knowledge, and into the
ways in which these are exploited strategically to gain control and persuade
through imposition. This strategic use of you know is arguably a universal
human tendency which we would expect to see replicated in other languages, a
hypothesis that it would be of great interest to test. Finally, we have seen how
the Figure-Ground shift from the propositional and cognitive core semantics of
YOU KNOW to the interpersonal appeal for shared understanding can branch
in two directions, not only along a pragmatically enriched route towards
imposition and control over the addressee, but also along a semantically
bleached route where it can be used to flag repair, seek help in word searches
and reformulation and to fill pauses. Even in its coalesced form, however, the
core semantics of y’know is maintained, differentiating it from other markers,
such as I mean.

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Cambridge Books Online

Pragmatic Markers in British English

Meaning in Social Interaction

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139507110

Online ISBN: 9781139507110

Hardback ISBN: 9781107032767

5 - You know pp. 97-125

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139507110.006

Cambridge University Press

text monitors social monitors metalinguistic monitors

Discourse markers, Editing Interactive markers (including Approximators, Hedges,

also approximate or provide insufﬁcient information (‘uncertainty’, Östman

5.2.1 Hesitation and appeal to common knowledge

5.2.3 Clariﬁcation and appeal to common knowledge

5.2.4 Attention-getting/launching a new piece of information

5.2.5 Direct appeal to shared knowledge/initiating a topic

5.2.7 You know in ﬁnal position: pointing out a self-evident

found to be 24.19 vs 15.89 per million words.3 There were no examples of

5.2.8 Most frequently used functions of you know

Word count 136,606 51,417 493, 852 80,463 134,275 145,508

Non-pragmatic marker/ 14 12 32 50 24 44 176

5.3 Sociolinguistic features

5.3.2 ‘Macro’ categories: social class, gender and age of speaker

AB 67 (86 in all) (78%) 2,328 716,328 32.5 p<.001

for Labov’s (1990) suggestion that females tend to be in the vanguard of

0–14 107 (201 in all) (53%) 996 355,673 28 p<.001

Table 5.6. Distributional frequency of you know in different genres in

Genre Rate per 10,000 words Tokens Word count

1 S_interv_oral 54.55 4,359 798,978

5.3.3 Situational variation in the use of you know

(5.13) (SP:PS2MX) Right.

5.3.4 Attitudes to you know

speaker a: They obviously thought he was a bit stupid.

Compared with Speaker A (without you know), Speaker B is more:

Polite Direct Educated Friendly

you know 3 (3) 3 (4) 3 (4) 3 (3)

know when it is used in different positions in the utterance and in different

you know – you know – you know – you know –

Mean Mean Mean Mean

older respondents considered the version with right-hand you know to be

words, as an attention-getting feature or to evoke consensuality, it seems likely

5.4 Historical semantic change

Brinton (1996: 244) provides further discussion of the syntactic develop-

use of you know, a parenthetical usage, which implies shared knowledge, a

a little’ in (5.21)) is in initial position in these cases. In the case where it is

Table 5.9. Figure-Ground shift (modelled on Waltereit 2006: 68)

you know you know appeal/shared understanding

(thing said) ‘you’ + cognitive verb ‘know’ ﬁgure ground

Table 5.10. Verb-form reanalysis: y’know (modelled on Waltereit 2006: 69)

y’ know you know appeal/shared understanding

(thing heard) y’know ﬁgure ground

In a more synchronic investigation of the grammaticalisation of you know,

Core semantics semantically bleached

Figure 5.1 A synchronic/diachronic map of the polysemy of you know

evocation of consensual truths occurring ﬁnally, along with agreement-seeking

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