This paper is part of a wider research on the prosodic devices used in the production of stretches of direct speech embedded in Greek young women’s narratives. Drawing on the broader framework of Discourse Analysis and Sociolinguistics as well as on recent developments in the theory of prosody and on the social constructionist paradigm, our paper follows the line of research that focuses on situated analysis of identities. We analyse both quantitatively and qualitatively the discourse functions of the prosodic features of speed and intensity, aiming to show the dynamic nature of identity construction in narrative context. We argue that, in the process of identity construction and projection, our young female informants attempt to signal both their independence from adult authority as well as their in-group bonds.
This paper deals with disaffiliation and membership categorization processes among German adolescent girls. Drawing on a peer-group which I conceptualize as a ‘community of practice’ (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992), this case study aims to show how the girls’ disaffiliation and categorization of several outgroups serve to negotiate various identity aspects (gender being one of them). The paper investigates the various linguistic resources and communicative strategies the girls apply in their everyday identity negotiations. Further, I will discuss which of these resources and strategies can be seen as typical instances of (German) youngspeak. The data is taken from a larger conversation analytic and ethnographic research project on talk-in-interaction among a group of ‘normal’ German high school girls.
In this paper, we explore a group of Turkish-speaking young Londoners’ multilingual practices and identity negotiations in a diasporic context, two Turkish complementary schools. The paper draws upon field-notes and digital recordings to investigate how the young people in question contextually select code-switching, the use of intertextual references and playful talk as linguistic resources to craft identity options for themselves and others during Turkish literacy teaching. We explore the Turkish-speaking young people’s multilingual practices in the context of the traditional Initiation-Response-Feedback (henceforth IRF) sequence. We suggest that the interactional moments when young people contextually select and juxtapose these linguistic resources for work, play and social affiliation or disaffiliation can provide us with useful insights into youngspeak in diasporic institutional contexts.
One of the most characteristic features of teenage talk is its vocabulary, understood as a tool that unifies the group, while excluding the outsiders. When studying teenage talk, we observe that it abounds in fixed phrases of different structures and with different functions. These elements should be considered not only in the lexicological field, but also in the field of pragmatics in order for the communicative function of the phraseological units to be identified. This paper discusses these aspects by considering some of the fixed phrases used by today’s Madrid teenagers, as reflected in COLAm (Corpus de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid). The contexts in which the fixed phrases occur will prove to be fundamental for understanding their meaning and function.
This paper discusses the use of the Spanish expression en plan as a pragmatic marker, more specifically as a hedge in Madrid boys’ and girls’ spontaneous conversation, when used as a politeness device to save both the speaker’s and the hearer’s face. This function is the most frequent one in the material studied in this paper, which emerges from Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm) The differences between boys and girls uses are also analysed, as well as the distribution among social classes.
This paper will outline the theoretical and methodological aspects of comparative research on youth language (with a special focus on the pluricentric Spanish language) in order to arrive at a reliable description of the characteristics and the contextual conditions of the emergence of youth language in different socio-cultural situations as well as their underlying aims, conditions and possible parameters of investigation in accordance with the (pragmatic) identity functions of youth language. Three types of comparison will be established – reflecting the typological, the contrastive and the diatopic-contrastive approach. A particular focus is on diatopic-contrastive research, since comparison of regional varieties of youth language within one language has not played a major role in the debate about youth language so far.
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 article, which compares the various pragmatic functions of pues nada in teenage conversation with the functions of anyway, which seems to be its nearest correspondence in English. The study shows that both items, besides creating and maintaining coherence, serve as organizers and monitors on the discourse level as well as indicators of speaker attitudes and intentions on the interactional/interpersonal level. Sometimes they are just uttered to show that there is nothing more to say. Other markers with similar functions, notably Spanish bueno and English OK and well, will also be considered.
This article analyses the use of anglicisms in two conversations from two corpora of informal adolescent language, the UNO-corpus from Oslo, Norway, and de COLAs corpus from Santiago, Chile. The speakers are boys at the age of 14 with a middle/lower middle class background. The study shows that the use of anglicisms in both conversations is limited, but that the topic of the conversations influences the number of anglicisms. It also shows that anglicims in the process of integration do integrate both phonetically and morphologically, while those that are not integrated tend to maintain their foreign pronunciation. The analysis is based on the functional theory suggested by Halliday (1978). In the selected conversations, most of the anglicisms are nouns used to name new items that lack a name in the borrowing language, what Halliday calls the ideational function, used to define the external world. Anglicisms are also used with an interpersonal function, expressing feelings towards the other participants in the conversation and finally to fulfil the textual function, creating variation in the text.
This paper compares the use of slang by the teenagers represented in The Corpus of Kaunas Teenage Language and The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language. The comparison shows that teenage slang is a psycho-social phenomenon representing three major categories, which exhibit gender-based differences; that psycho-social factors influence the creation and function of gender- and age-specific slang; that the prevalence of boys’ slang contributes to the masculine characteristics of slang; and that the psycho-social factors that stimulate the teenagers’ emotions affect the use of slang, giving rise to offensive and humorous slang. Both groups identify themselves and their groups by using slang, but while the 10–13 year-olds are the most active users of slang in Kaunas, the distribution among the London age groups is more even.
This paper is part of a wider research on the prosodic devices used in the production of stretches of direct speech embedded in Greek young women’s narratives. Drawing on the broader framework of Discourse Analysis and Sociolinguistics as well as on recent developments in the theory of prosody and on the social constructionist paradigm, our paper follows the line of research that focuses on situated analysis of identities. We analyse both quantitatively and qualitatively the discourse functions of the prosodic features of speed and intensity, aiming to show the dynamic nature of identity construction in narrative context. We argue that, in the process of identity construction and projection, our young female informants attempt to signal both their independence from adult authority as well as their in-group bonds.
This paper deals with disaffiliation and membership categorization processes among German adolescent girls. Drawing on a peer-group which I conceptualize as a ‘community of practice’ (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992), this case study aims to show how the girls’ disaffiliation and categorization of several outgroups serve to negotiate various identity aspects (gender being one of them). The paper investigates the various linguistic resources and communicative strategies the girls apply in their everyday identity negotiations. Further, I will discuss which of these resources and strategies can be seen as typical instances of (German) youngspeak. The data is taken from a larger conversation analytic and ethnographic research project on talk-in-interaction among a group of ‘normal’ German high school girls.
In this paper, we explore a group of Turkish-speaking young Londoners’ multilingual practices and identity negotiations in a diasporic context, two Turkish complementary schools. The paper draws upon field-notes and digital recordings to investigate how the young people in question contextually select code-switching, the use of intertextual references and playful talk as linguistic resources to craft identity options for themselves and others during Turkish literacy teaching. We explore the Turkish-speaking young people’s multilingual practices in the context of the traditional Initiation-Response-Feedback (henceforth IRF) sequence. We suggest that the interactional moments when young people contextually select and juxtapose these linguistic resources for work, play and social affiliation or disaffiliation can provide us with useful insights into youngspeak in diasporic institutional contexts.
One of the most characteristic features of teenage talk is its vocabulary, understood as a tool that unifies the group, while excluding the outsiders. When studying teenage talk, we observe that it abounds in fixed phrases of different structures and with different functions. These elements should be considered not only in the lexicological field, but also in the field of pragmatics in order for the communicative function of the phraseological units to be identified. This paper discusses these aspects by considering some of the fixed phrases used by today’s Madrid teenagers, as reflected in COLAm (Corpus de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid). The contexts in which the fixed phrases occur will prove to be fundamental for understanding their meaning and function.
This paper discusses the use of the Spanish expression en plan as a pragmatic marker, more specifically as a hedge in Madrid boys’ and girls’ spontaneous conversation, when used as a politeness device to save both the speaker’s and the hearer’s face. This function is the most frequent one in the material studied in this paper, which emerges from Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm) The differences between boys and girls uses are also analysed, as well as the distribution among social classes.
This paper will outline the theoretical and methodological aspects of comparative research on youth language (with a special focus on the pluricentric Spanish language) in order to arrive at a reliable description of the characteristics and the contextual conditions of the emergence of youth language in different socio-cultural situations as well as their underlying aims, conditions and possible parameters of investigation in accordance with the (pragmatic) identity functions of youth language. Three types of comparison will be established – reflecting the typological, the contrastive and the diatopic-contrastive approach. A particular focus is on diatopic-contrastive research, since comparison of regional varieties of youth language within one language has not played a major role in the debate about youth language so far.
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 article, which compares the various pragmatic functions of pues nada in teenage conversation with the functions of anyway, which seems to be its nearest correspondence in English. The study shows that both items, besides creating and maintaining coherence, serve as organizers and monitors on the discourse level as well as indicators of speaker attitudes and intentions on the interactional/interpersonal level. Sometimes they are just uttered to show that there is nothing more to say. Other markers with similar functions, notably Spanish bueno and English OK and well, will also be considered.
This article analyses the use of anglicisms in two conversations from two corpora of informal adolescent language, the UNO-corpus from Oslo, Norway, and de COLAs corpus from Santiago, Chile. The speakers are boys at the age of 14 with a middle/lower middle class background. The study shows that the use of anglicisms in both conversations is limited, but that the topic of the conversations influences the number of anglicisms. It also shows that anglicims in the process of integration do integrate both phonetically and morphologically, while those that are not integrated tend to maintain their foreign pronunciation. The analysis is based on the functional theory suggested by Halliday (1978). In the selected conversations, most of the anglicisms are nouns used to name new items that lack a name in the borrowing language, what Halliday calls the ideational function, used to define the external world. Anglicisms are also used with an interpersonal function, expressing feelings towards the other participants in the conversation and finally to fulfil the textual function, creating variation in the text.
This paper compares the use of slang by the teenagers represented in The Corpus of Kaunas Teenage Language and The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language. The comparison shows that teenage slang is a psycho-social phenomenon representing three major categories, which exhibit gender-based differences; that psycho-social factors influence the creation and function of gender- and age-specific slang; that the prevalence of boys’ slang contributes to the masculine characteristics of slang; and that the psycho-social factors that stimulate the teenagers’ emotions affect the use of slang, giving rise to offensive and humorous slang. Both groups identify themselves and their groups by using slang, but while the 10–13 year-olds are the most active users of slang in Kaunas, the distribution among the London age groups is more even.