Edited by Anna-Brita Stenström and Annette Myre Jørgensen
Despite its potential influence on the standard language, there is still relatively little written about the language of the young. This book gives new insight into some important areas of their language, such as identity construction reflected, for instance, in prosodic patterns and language… read more
This book brings together a number of empirical studies that use corpora to study discourse patterns in speech and writing. It explores new trends in the area of text and discourse characterized by the alliance between text linguistics and areas such as corpus linguistics, genre analysis, literary… read more
Anna-Brita Stenström, Gisle Andersen and Ingrid Kristine Hasund
Teenage talk is fascinating, though so far teenage language has not been given the attention in linguistic research that it merits. The dearth of investigations into teenage language is due in part to under representation in language corpora. With the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT)… read more
The form innit (from isn’t it) is used as a pragmatic marker in the same way as yes, yeah and okay by London teenagers. This chapter discusses how this usage has developed by comparing The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT) with the more recent Multicultural London English Corpus… read more
The primary aim of this study has been to find out whether the choice and frequency of pragmatic markers can be said to distinguish phatic talk (‘chats’) from informative talk. A secondary aim has been to consider the bonding effect of the pragmatic markers. Five conversational extracts from COLT… read more
As has been emphasized in a number of publications, pragmatic/discourse markers play a crucial role in colloquial language overall, and in young people’s language in particular. But the use of pragmatic markers in a contrastive perspective has attracted less attention. This paper is devoted to the… read more
The use of Spanish pues nada as a pragmatic marker, which has so far been overlooked in the linguistic literature, has aroused an interest among the general public, as reflected in an interesting correspondence on the Internet. This discussion has been used as a starting-point for the present… read more
This corpus-based article explores London and Madrid teenagers’ use of phatic expressions as a politeness device in their everyday conversations. The starting-point for the study is Leech’s ‘Phatic Maxim’, which he suggests as a supplement to the four maxims making up Grice’s Cooperative Principle. read more
This paper reports on a corpus-based comparison of the use of taboo words amongst middle/upper class teenage girls in London and Madrid. Two corpora of spontaneous conversation were used for the comparison; these showed that the most frequent words used by both groups had sexual reference, followed… read more
