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In its first part, the present paper presents an interactional linguistic study of the pragmatic marker wollt grad sagen (‘I was going to say’). This marker shows a high degree of formal, functional and contextual variation. It is used within four different practices, which we term affirmation, disclosure, reassurance and resumption. Each practice has a set of typical lexical and syntactic realization forms as well as a typical position within a turn and a conversational sequence. The second part of the paper explores the possibility of using meta data categories included in the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German (FOLK) in order to investigate the distribution of different variants of the pragmatic marker under investigation across three social categories (interactional domain, region, and gender). We find that the pragmatic marker is associated with private, largely informal interactions. The associations with the categories region and gender are hard to interpret, as the corpus is not balanced with regard to these categories and the total number of instances of the marker is too small for a more advanced quantification. Nevertheless, the study demonstrates how interactional linguistic and variational pragmatic research questions can be integrated methodologically.
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