Youngspeak
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Anna-Brita Stenström
Abstract
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 Spanish pragmatic marker vale and its closest English equivalent okay, as they are used in Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm) and The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT). These markers have a great deal in common: (1) they are both very frequent in conversational encounters, (2) they are both multifunctional, and (3) most of the functions seem to converge. The study shows, among other things, that okay is a more versatile marker than vale, which, on the other hand, is slightly more frequent than okay, and that both markers are used more frequently by teenagers than by adults.
Abstract
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 Spanish pragmatic marker vale and its closest English equivalent okay, as they are used in Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm) and The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT). These markers have a great deal in common: (1) they are both very frequent in conversational encounters, (2) they are both multifunctional, and (3) most of the functions seem to converge. The study shows, among other things, that okay is a more versatile marker than vale, which, on the other hand, is slightly more frequent than okay, and that both markers are used more frequently by teenagers than by adults.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- In memory of Stig Johansson v
- Table of contents vii
- List of contributors ix
- Introduction 1
- Tertia comparationis in multilingual corpora 7
- Seeing the lexical profile of Swedish through multilingual corpora 25
- A corpus-based analysis of English affixal negation translated into Spanish 57
- English adverbs of essence and their equivalents in Dutch and French 83
- A parallel corpus approach to investigating semantic change 103
- Youngspeak 127
- Quantity approximation in English and French business news reporting 139
- Enriching the phraseological coverage of high-frequency adverbs in English-French bilingual dictionaries 157
- Using recurrent word-combinations to explore cross-linguistic differences 177
- Cohesive substitution in English and German 201
- The extraposition of clausal subjects in English and Swedish 233
- Thematic variation in English and Spanish newspaper genres 261
- Author index 287
- Subject index 291
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- In memory of Stig Johansson v
- Table of contents vii
- List of contributors ix
- Introduction 1
- Tertia comparationis in multilingual corpora 7
- Seeing the lexical profile of Swedish through multilingual corpora 25
- A corpus-based analysis of English affixal negation translated into Spanish 57
- English adverbs of essence and their equivalents in Dutch and French 83
- A parallel corpus approach to investigating semantic change 103
- Youngspeak 127
- Quantity approximation in English and French business news reporting 139
- Enriching the phraseological coverage of high-frequency adverbs in English-French bilingual dictionaries 157
- Using recurrent word-combinations to explore cross-linguistic differences 177
- Cohesive substitution in English and German 201
- The extraposition of clausal subjects in English and Swedish 233
- Thematic variation in English and Spanish newspaper genres 261
- Author index 287
- Subject index 291
