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) a large corpus of teenage language has become available for research. The first part of Trends in Teenage Talk gives a description how the COLT corpus was collected and processed; the speakers are presented with special emphasis on the recruits and their various backgrounds; ending with a description what the COLT teenagers talk about and how they do it. The second part of the book is devoted to the most prominent features of the teenagers' talk: 'slanguage'; how reported speech is manifested; a survey of non-standard grammatical features; the use of intensifiers; tags; and interactional behaviour in terms of conflict talk.
This in-depth study of the use of pragmatic markers by Spanish and English teenagers offers insight into the currently under-investigated area of teenage talk through the analysis of the Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid and The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Talk.
Introduction / Anna-Brita Stenström and Annette Myre Jörgensen -- Identity construction: On young women's prosodic construction of identity: evidence from Greek conversational narratives / Argiris Archakis and Dimitris Papazachariou -- Now he thinks he's listening to rock music: identity construction among German teenage girls / Janet Spreckels -- Multilingual practices and identity negotiations among Turkish-speaking young people in a diasporic context / Vally Lytra and Taskin Baraç -- Particular expressions: Lexical innovations in Madrid's teenage talk: some intensifiers / Juan A. Martínez López -- En plan used as a hedge in Spanish teenage language / Annette Myre Jörgensen -- Languages in contrast: a proposal for comparative research on youth language with an outline of diatopic-contrast research within the Hispanic world / Klaus Zimmermann -- Pragmatic markers in contrast: Spanish pues nada and English anyway / Anna-Brita Stenström -- Anglicisms in the informal speech of Norwegian and Chilean adolescents / Eli-Marie Drange -- Similarities and differences between slang in Kaunas and London teenagers' speech / Jolanta Legaudaite
How do today's teenagers talk? What are the distinguishing features of their style of language, and what do they tell us about the English language more generally? Drawing on a huge corpus of examples collected over a fifteen-year period, Sali A. Tagliamonte undertakes a detailed study of adolescents' language and argues that it acts as a 'bellwether' for the future of the English language. Teenagers are often accused of 'lowering the standards' of the English language by the way they talk and text. From spoken words - 'like', 'so', 'just', and 'stuff' - to abbreviated expressions used online, this fascinating book puts young people's language under the microscope, examining and demystifying the origins of new words, and tracking how they vary according to gender, geographical location, and social circumstances. Highly topical and full of new insights, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in how teenagers talk.
This ethnographic study of adolescent social structure in a Michigan high school shows how the school's institutional environment fosters the formation of opposed class cultures in the student population, which in turn serve as a social tracking system.
This volume examines how oral and written language function in school learning , and how oral texts can be successfully inter-connected to the written texts that are used on a daily basis in schools. Rather than argue for the prominence of one over the other, the goal is to help the reader gain a rich understanding of how both might work together to create a new discourse that ultimately creates new knowledge. Talking Texts: Provides historical background for the study of talk and text Presents examples of children’s and adolescents’ natural conversations as analyzed by linguists Addresses talk as it interfaces with domains of knowledge taught in schools to show how talk is related to and may be influenced by the structure, language, and activities of a specific discipline. Bringing together seminal lines of research to create a cohesive picture of discourse issues germane to classrooms and other learning settings, this volume is an essential resource for researchers, graduate students, classroom teachers, and curriculum specialists across the fields of discourse studies, literacy and English education, composition studies, language development, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics.
Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,0, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Sociolinguistics: language variation and change, language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction In September 2010 a huge debate started in Britain after the famous actress Emma Thompson had given an interview for the BBC during which she complained heavily about the language of teenagers. “I went to give a talk at my old school and the girls were all doing their ‘likes’ and ‘innit’ and ‘it ain’ts’, which drives me insane”1, she said indignantly. Her statement probably mirrors what the majority of adults think of the language used by teenagers today. “Parents and teachers often have a critical and negative attitude towards adolescent language, judging it as ‘sloppy’ and attempting to correct vernacular features such as local accents, slang words, discourse particles or code-mixing.” (Androutsopoulos 2005: 1501) This debate about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of vernacular language use traces back to the very roots of modern sociolinguistics. The American linguist William Labov was the first who conducted several quantitative studies concerning language variation in the 1960s (cf. Becker & Bieswanger 2006: 193). He tried to find out how the social background of speakers influences their language use, and why people decide to use either standard or non-standard language. Concluding from his studies, he developed the concept of language prestige, which assumes that standard forms have obvious (overt) prestige, whereas non-standard forms of language have a kind of hidden (covert) prestige among its speakers (cf. Becker & Bieswanger 2006: 197). So he argued that speakers do not merely use non-standard forms of language because they are uneducated or not able to use the standard form, but because the non-standard form carries symbolic or indexical meaning that the speakers want to draw on. According to that, language choice can be used to express identity or to mark group membership. Taking Labov’s concept into consideration, contemporary teenage language should not be solely interpreted as a sign of an increasing lack of education or language decay. On the contrary, it is an expression of children’s growing identity that seeks for separation from the adult world. “Adolescence is a turning-point in life, as the individual matures both physically and cognitively, and thus has a direct influence on language acquisition and development.” (Martinez 2011a: 5)
The twenty papers of this volume - published to honour Gunnel Tottie - are of interest to everyone concerned with the study of the English language. The collection is a convincing argument for an approach to language studies based on the analysis of computerized corpora. Though this is not an introduction to the field but a series of highly specialized studies, readers get a good overview of the work being done at present in English computer corpus studies. English corpus linguistics, though basically concerned with the study of varieties of English, goes far beyond the simple ordering and counting of large numbers of examples but is deeply concerned with linguistic theory - based on real language data. The volume includes sections on corpora of written and spoken present-day English, historical corpora, contrastive corpora, and on the application of corpus studies to teaching purposes.
This book represents a synchronic sociolinguistic analysis of gender-related variation in the speech of English and Romanian adolescents. It is motivated by the belief that variation is a characteristic of natural language, and that a comprehensive understanding of language must include a grasp of the nature and function of variation. The book analyses sociolinguistic features of adolescent speech that occur in natural, spontaneous, everyday speech, thus representing a major contribution to the study of language in its social context.
