An investigation of general extenders in a corpus of parliamentary debates

The paper illustrates the important role played by vague expressions in native speaker communicative competence and investigates the use of a particular type of vague expressions, general extenders - like ‘and so on’, ‘or something’, ‘etcetera’ - in two subcorpora of 62 EU parliamentary debates comprising native English and non-native English. Results show that by far the most frequent general extenders occurring in the two subcorpora are ‘and so on’ and ‘etcetera’, which Overstreet (1999) has found to be typical of formal settings. In keeping with Terraschke and Holmes (2007), who investigated the use of general extenders in conversations, this study shows that general extenders have similar functions in the two subcorpora. From a formal point of view, the form [adjectives + general extender] appears exclusively in the native subcorpus, albeit in three cases, which may indicate a greater conformity to the norm on the part of non-native speakers.