Reiteration as a multifunctional element in spontaneous conversational discourse in English and Armenian: crosscultural perspective

Abstract

Repetition, or reiteration, is well known to be a stylistic device used to emphasize a certain idea in a text. Utilized mainly in fiction, repetitions convey the author’s intention to highlight an idea in a speech segment. In spontaneous spoken language, repetition performs different functions. Depending on the communicative situation, repetition can have emphasizing and rheme-identifying functions, as well as the function of indicating difficulty in phrasing ideas. This article presents a contrastive analysis of the types of reiteration frequently met in spontaneous spoken English and Armenian, their distributional properties and functions.