On the types and frequency of meta-language in conversation: A preliminary report

Human dialog is a highly collaborative and interactive process, which includes the ability to talk about the dialog itself and its linguistic constituents, and to use meta- linguistic interactions to help coordinate the ongoing conversation. However, the frequency and conditions under which people resort to meta-language are not well known. This paper presents the results of a corpus study in which a markup scheme for meta-language was applied to a sub-set of the British National Corpus. Introduction and Background