Teenage Talk

From General Characteristics to the Use of Pragmatic Markers in a Contrastive Perspective

A. Stenström

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137430373
• eBook ISBN: 9781137430380
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

1

Introduction

Abstract: The aim of this book is twofold: first, to give an overview of what characterizes teenage talk in general and second to show how the use of pragmatic markers (smallwords) facilitates the smooth run of talk on three levels of conversation, the interactional, interpersonal and textual levels, as reflected in two corpora of spontaneous speech, Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm) and The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT). A description of the corpora and the speakers is followed by a definition of ‘pragmatic markers’.

Stenström, Anna-Brita. Teenage Talk: From General Characteristics to the Use of Pragmatic Markers in a Contrastive Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137430380.0005.

1.1 The aim

The aim of this book is twofold: first, this book provides an overview of the characteristics of teenage talk in general. Second, it shows how some very common, and some less common but very recent, pragmatic markers are used in teenage talk in a contrastive perspective.

Spanish and English teenage talk can be seen as a fairly obvious choice for a contrastive study because of the steadily rising popularity of Spanish outside the Spanish-speaking countries and the dominance of English as a world language. Further, pragmatic markers are something we simply cannot do without and that everybody uses. Not only do they make it easier to keep the conversation going by giving us time to think and by helping us structure what we are going to say, but they also contribute to a livelier conversation by creating intimate contact between the speaker and the hearer, something that seems to be particularly important in teenage talk. In other words, they are the means by which language facilitates the link between what is said and the context (Portolés 1998: 127). What makes pragmatic markers particularly interesting from another point of view is that they bear witness to ongoing language change.

The fact that Spanish is becoming more and more popular among speakers of English is reflected, not least, in the queries and comments on the internet, where people keep asking what particular Spanish expressions are in English, queries such as ‘I would like to know the difference between ¿qué tal? and ¿cómo estás?’ (WordReference.com) and ‘What does that mean, pues nada, exactly?’ (notesfromspain.com). These expressions and a number of others will be dealt with in detail with Spanish as a starting-point and matched with their most likely English equivalents.

1.2 The corpora

The book is based on extracts from Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm) and The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), which are built up along roughly the same lines to enable comparison. COLT was collected in 1993 and COLAm ten years later. The main features of the corpora are the following:

teenage student ‘recruits’ from various metropolitan school districts,

the speakers, including the recruits, are teenage boys and girls in addition to the occasional family member or teacher,

all socioeconomic backgrounds are represented, ranging from low to medium to high class,

the recordings make up approximately half a million words in each corpus,

the corpora have been orthographically transcribed and provided with a sound track,

the corpora are accessible online (www.hd.uib.no/colt; www.colam.org).

The difference in the time of collection will not, I think, have a negative effect on the results presented in this book. What does have consequences, however, is the fact that the corpora collection resulted in certain irregularities with regard to gender, age, and socioeconomic representation (see Chapter 8).

To make up for the time lag between the collection of the English and Spanish corpora, consideration will be paid to recent findings in London teenagers’ talk in Chapter 9.

1.3 The speakers

The conversations were recorded by the students themselves without ‘professional’ interference in order to represent genuinely spontaneous talk. That is, a number of students provided with recording equipment volunteered to record the conversations they were involved in with their friends of the same age for a couple of days and in various surroundings, such as the school yard, at home, in the street, at a café, in a park, and so on. To get as much information about the speakers as possible, they were asked to make a note of their friends’ age and socioeconomic background. The fact that they were only told to record as much talk as possible but with no specific instructions, for instance, suggestions on what to talk about, probably explains why it was sometimes hard to get a conversation started; and the presence of a microphone, which was unfortunately not possible to hide, did not make the situation more comfortable. Therefore, sequences like (1) and (2) are very common in COLAm:

(1)	Isabel:	¿porqué tienes que grabar?
		‘why do you have to record?’
	Belén:	porque es un proyecto MAESB2
		‘cos it’s a project’
(2)	Ana:	esto es un micrófono te vamos a tener controlado MALCE2
		‘this is a microphone, we are going to keep you under control’

In COLT we find examples such as (3):

(3)	Jim:	oh heck you have the microphone.
	Benny:	I’m gonna record Zoe speaking to Charlie 41601

As a matter of fact, the word microphone is mentioned six times in COLAm and as many as 176 times in COLT, while grabar (‘record’) is mentioned 137 times and record 123 times.

The speakers understood that they were expected to produce ‘typical teenage language’, which they took for granted would be language with a lot of slang, taboo, and swearwords. This resulted in utterances such as (4), uttered by a recruit:

(4)	A:	... sí sí sí sí lo que queremos son palabrotas ... MAESB2
		‘... yes yes yes yes what we want is swearwords’

and (5) uttered by one of the other speakers:

(5)

A:

... well, we can like endlessly swear on it 33901

All in all, the conversations are characterized by an abundant use of contact-creating expressions, taboo and swearwords, and a frequent use of vague language in addition to youth-specific intensifiers and slang. Some of these features might also be present in adult conversation, but then to a far lesser extent. These and other youth-specific features are described in detail in the following chapters, and their importance for the successful outcome of small talk is demonstrated by means of numerous extracts from the corpora. The Madrid teenagers’ language is the point of departure with the London teenagers’ language used for comparison.

1.4 The pragmatic markers

Items that I refer to as pragmatic markers have been discussed in a vast number of studies provided with various labels, for instance ‘discourse particles’ by Schourup (1985) and Östman (1981), ‘pragmatic expressions’ by Erman (1987), ‘discou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Teenage Talk in General
• 3  Teenage Language = Bad Language?
• 4  Pragmatic Markers in the Corpora
• 5  Background
• 6  How the Pragmatic Markers Are Used
• 7  Summing Up the Three Levels
• 8  The Sociolinguistic Aspect
• 9  Recent Tendencies in London Teenage Talk
• 10  Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index