Multifunctionality of the discourse marker okay in spoken English: A sociolinguistic examination linked to age.

The present study aims to examine the discourse marker (henceforth DM) okay by making use of the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014). The objective is to investigate the multifunctional status of okay, and to examine sociolinguistic variation by taking age as the main variable. Many studies have been undertaken to describe the linguistic features of the DM okay and have demonstrated that it is susceptible to variation according to gender (Johannsen et al. 2015) and age (Stenström et al. 2002; Torgersen et al. 2011). On no occasions, however, have the multifunctional features of okay been described by accounting for sociolinguistic variation exhibited by people of all ages in spoken English. The present study is a corpus-based investigation that aims to fill this gap and examine the linguistic features and sociolinguistic variation exhibited by okay in contemporary English. The analysis reveals that there is variation in the use of okay among people of different ages and changes in apparent time. Specifically, signs of change concern the collocational profile and uses of the DM okay with the function of a response form, especially in the age group 0–14. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]