Whose discourse particles? New Zealand eh in the Niuean migrant community

Over the past 20 years, there has been considerable research into the use of discourse particles in many varieties of English. Much of the New Zealand research has highlighted differences in the use of discourse particles between Pakeha (NZE speakers of British descent) and Maori (New Zealand's indigenous Polynesian peoples) (Holmes, 1986, 1995; Meyerhoff, 1994; Stubbe and Holmes, 1995, 2000) and has shown Maori to make greater use of addressee oriented discourse particles, such as you know and eh. This paper adds to the existing literature by considering the distribution and function of the discourse particle eh in the speech of Niuean New Zealanders. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.