Teenage 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. It provides an overview of the main features of spontaneous teenage conversation, such as slang and taboo words, and discusses the importance of language contact, ethnicity and identity, and the role of speaker background in terms of gender, age and social class. The analysis is based on Spanish teenagers' use of pragmatic markers as reflected in "Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid", which is matched by corresponding markers used by the teenagers in T"he Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Talk". Stenstrom analyses in detail how the markers are used on three levels of conversation: interactional (e.g. greetings "¿qu tal?/how are you?"), interpersonal (e.g. checking "sabes/you know") and textual (e.g. "en plan/like"). After examining the sociolinguistic elements of teenage talk, the book moves on to describe recent linguistic tendencies in London teenage speak, making it of great interest to researchers of contemporary culture as well as sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics.