Karin Aijmer

Gisle Andersen

Pragmatics of society takes a socio-cultural perspective on pragmatics and gives a broad view of how social and cultural factors influence language use. The volume covers a wide range of topics within the field of sociopragmatics. This subfield of pragmatics encompasses sociolinguistic studies that focus on how pragmatic and discourse features vary according to macro-sociological variables such as age, gender, class and region (variational pragmatics), and discourse/conversation analytical studies investigating variation according to the activity engaged in by the participants and the identities displayed as relevant in interaction. The volume also covers studies in linguistic pragmatics with a more general socio-cultural focus, including global and intercultural communication, politeness, critical discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Each article presents the state-of-the-art of the topic at hand, as well as new research.

Pragmatics of Society

Anna-Brita Stenström

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) 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.

Corpus Compilation, Analysis, and Findings

Trends in Teenage Talk

Kristin Bech

As its title suggests, this book is a selection of papers that use English corpora to study language variation along three dimensions – time, place and genre. In broad terms, the book aims to bridge the gap between corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics and to increase our knowledge of the characteristics of English language. It includes eleven papers which address a variety of research questions but with the commonality of a corpus-based methodology. Some of the contributions deal with language variation in time, either by looking into historical corpora of English or by adopting the method known as diachronic comparable corpus linguistics, thus illustrating how corpora can be used to illuminate either historical or recent developments of English. Other studies investigate variation in space by comparing different varieties of English, including some of the “New Englishes” such as the South Asian varieties of English. Finally, some of the papers deal with variation in genre, by looking into the use of language for specific purposes through the inspection of medical articles, social reports and academic writing.

Selected papers from ICAME 32.

English Corpus Linguistics: Variation in Time, Space and Genre.

This book combines theoretical work in linguistic pragmatics and sociolinguistics with empirical work based on a corpus of London adolescent conversation. It makes a general contribution to the study of pragmatic markers, as it proposes an analytical model that involves notions such as subjectivity, interactional and textual capacity, and the distinction between contextual alignment/divergence. These notions are defined according to how information contained in an utterance interacts with the cognitive environment of the hearer. Moreover, the model captures the diachronic development of markers from lexical items via processes of grammaticalisation, arguing that markerhood may be viewed as a gradient phenomenon. The empirical work concerns the use of like as a marker, as well as a characteristic use of two originally interrogative forms, innit and is it, which are used as attitudinal markers throughout the inflectional paradigm, despite the fact that they contain a third person singular neuter pronoun. The author provides an in-depth analysis of these features in terms of pragmatic functions, diachronic development and sociolinguistic variation, thus adding support to the hypothesis that adolescents play an important role in language variation and change.

Gisle Andersen

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