Use of Wait as a Discourse-Pragmatic Marker in Spoken British English

Discourse-pragmatic markers—DPMs—have attracted much scholarly attention over the years since they play an important role in our daily lives. Most of them have been analysed by scholars. However, in this paper, I focus on one of these units, wait, a DPM which, with the exception of Tagliamonte (Wait, It’s a Discourse Marker) in the Canadian context, has been largely neglected. I follow a corpus-based approach, examining data from spoken British English extracted from the BNC2014. The study offers new light on the uses and functions of this DPM in the British English context and allows a comparison with the Canadian English data examined by Tagliamonte (Wait, It’s a Discourse Marker).