ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the sort of analysis that can be done with corpus linguistics; they do not pretend to give a reliable description of the use of the lexical hook ‘right’ in the corpus. In the analysis of this discourse-pragmatic marker, knowledge of the background context of the interlocutors adds a necessary social dimension in the understanding of this community of practice. The patterns function reveals that ‘right’ usually comes at the end of the turn, which is interesting from the point of view of conversation analysis. It also shows that ‘that’s right yeah’ is the most frequent and ‘all right’ the second most frequent. The clusters function makes this description more subtle, showing the frequency of each three-word cluster. Both the patterns and the clusters draw attention to the fact that DM is the one that uses ‘that’s right’ and ‘right’ most.
