Expressing Attitudinal Stance on Irish Local Radio Through the Use of "You Know"

Abstract

You know aids communication through a variety of functions, such as inviting addressee inferences, directing thematic changes or hedging. This study examines the role of you know in conveying the attitudinal stances expressed by guests on Radio Kerry, an Irish local radio station, during interviews and contributions between June 2021-March 2022. Each instance of you know is categorised according to function and its role in expressing attitudinal stance. The study shows a tendency for the use of you know to increase when a speaker is on live radio; its use is twice that of its use in a comparative corpus. It is considered that the multifunctionality of you know is the primary reason for its prevalence; it firstly organises one’s speech, whether it be through hesitation, discourse or thematic marking, and then aids in expressing attitudinal stance. These uses of you know grant speakers a degree of control over the conversation. Speakers under 40 years of age used you know to hedge most often, while those over 40 tended to use you know to hesitate more frequently. The older group of speakers also had a greater use of you know to express attitudinal stance. Politicians most frequently used you know to control the thematic direction of the conversation. Furthermore, the prevalence of you know in this corpus was considerably greater than in the Limerick Corpus of Irish English and the British National Corpus. The corpus created for this study is the first to consist solely of language used on an Irish local radio station.