THAT JACKSPRAT - AN INTERACTIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON ENGLISH THAT

This paper analyses the use of English that in a range of socially dis tinct discourses. The uses that are conventionally considered to be no nstandard or colloquial express interpersonal, affective meanings by c o-ordinating the speaker's and the addressee's attention on those poin ts in the discourse where a shared perspective is assumed to exist. Ot her uses of that in the corpus analysed here, including the relativize r and the complementizer, also have a primarily interactive function i n discourse. When seen within this perspective, several problems that previous scholars have noted in the analysis of deictic that no longer appear problematic, but instead follow a regular pattern of use. This pattern reflects the ways in which speakers and addressees co-operate in order to manage the cognitive and social constraints on their join t creation of discourse.