A syntactico -semantic study of comment clauses in the American series “friends”

Abstract EN

The current study aims at inspecting the ways by which the English speakers use the comment clauses in their everyday use conversations by examining these conversations syntactically and semantically and tracking the use of comment clauses over time in order to find out whether time has a significant impact on its use .The present study also aims at shedding light on the impact of “ the position of CCs and the kind of response to its use” on its semantic interpretation from the part of the speaker and the listener during their conversation.

The data of the present study is selected from the American sitcom “ Friends”.

The researcher analyzes the conversations of 18 episodes of this sitcom by adopting an eclectic model of Quirk et al.9(1985) , Erman (1986) , Stenström (1994) ,and Povolná( 2005b) .

This study is restricted to examine the use of the CCs (you know, I mean , you see) in the selected data.

The current study hypothesizes that the English speakers employ CCs in different semantic functions, taking advantage of the positon of these CCs and depending on the type of response expected from the listeners.

The study also hypothesizes that the participants of the analyzed conversations of the sitcom have used CCs intensively in the final season of the sitcom more than the first sitcom.

Being American sitcom , the researcher assumes that the CC ( you know ) is the most used one by the participants of the conversations of the sitcom “ Friends” .The researcher also assumes that the participants use most of CCs as empathizer .The researcher hypothesizes that CCs occur in the initial position of speech more than other ones and that the verbal response is the most frequent type of reaction to the use of CCs.

The present study leads to several conclusions .The analysis has demonstrated that CCs employ various semantic functions within the analyzed conversations ; they can act as ( empathizer , inform marker , monitor/error correction , appealer , and verbal filler ) , and the most dominant semantic function in these conversations is monitor /error correction.

The present study reveals that the use of CCs in the American sitcom “ Friends” has been declined in the final season ( season 10) .The findings also reveal that the speaker can change the intended meaning of CCs by changing the position of CCs within speech , and according to the kind of reaction expected from the current hearer.