Trends in Teenage Talk
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AUTHOR ""
TITLE "Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus compilation, analysis and findings"
SUBJECT "Studies in Corpus Linguistics, Volume 8"
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Trends in Teenage Talk
Studies in Corpus Linguistics Studies in Corpus Linguistics aims to provide insights into the way a corpus can be used, the type of findings that can be obtained, the possible applications of these findings as well as the theoretical changes that corpus work can bring into linguistics and language engineering. The main concern of SCL is to present findings based on, or related to, the cumulative effect of naturally occurring language and on the interpretation of frequency and distributional data.
General Editor Elena Tognini-Bonelli
Consulting Editor Wolfgang Teubert
Advisory Board Michael Barlow, Rice University, Houston Robert de Beaugrande, Federal University of Minas Gerais Douglas Biber, North Arizona University Chris Butler, University of Wales, Swansea Wallace Chafe, University of California Stig Johansson, Oslo University M. A. K. Halliday, University of Sydney Graeme Kennedy, Victoria University of Wellington John Laffling, Herriot Watt University, Edinburgh Geoffrey Leech, University of Lancaster John Sinclair, University of Birmingham Piet van Sterkenburg, Institute for Dutch Lexicology, Leiden Michael Stubbs, University of Trier Jan Svartvik, University of Lund H-Z. Yang, Jiao Tong University, Shanghai Antonio Zampolli, University of Pisa
Volume 8 Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus compilation, analysis and findings by Anna-Brita Stenström, Gisle Andersen and Ingrid Kristine Hasund
Trends in Teenage Talk Corpus compilation, analysis and findings
Anna-Brita Stenström Gisle Andersen Ingrid Kristine Hasund University of Bergen
John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia
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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Cover design: Françoise Berserik Cover illustration from original painting Random Order by Lorenzo Pezzatini, Florence, 1996.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stenström, Anna-Brita, 1932Trends in teenage talk : corpus compilation, analysis and findings / Anna-Brita Stenström, Gisle Andersen, Ingrid Kristine Hasund. p. cm. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics, issn 1388–0373 ; v. 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Youth--England--London--Language. 2. Sociolinguistics--England--London. 3. English language--Slang. I. Andersen, Gisle. II. Hasund, Ingrid Kristine. III. Title. IV. Series. P120.Y68 S74 2002 306.44’083’09421-dc21 isbn 9027222789 (Eur.) / 1588112527 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)
2002074754
© 2002 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
AUTHOR ""
TITLE "Table of contents"
SUBJECT "Studies in Corpus Linguistics, Volume 8"
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Table of contents
Chapter 1 From tape to CD-ROM 1.1 Getting teenage talk on tape3 1.2 Transcription7 1.3 Tagging10 1.4 CD-ROM production11 Chapter 2 The speakers 2.1 Social differences: Do the teenagers care?13 2.2 Social background: What does the corpus tell us?18 2.2.1 Age and gender19 2.2.2 Borough of residence and social class20 2.2.3 Ethnicity21 2.3 The recruits and the boroughs23 2.3.1 Hackney23 2.3.2 Tower Hamlets25 2.3.3 Camden25 2.3.4 Barnet26 2.3.5 Hertfordshire26 Chapter 3 The conversations 3.1 The teenagers and their peers28 3.1.1 Introduction28 3.1.2 Social networking29 3.1.3 Romance32 3.1.4 Sex talk38
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3.1.5 Partying and drinking41 3.1.6 The body43 3.1.7 Pastimes and hobbies46 3.1.8 ‘Bad’ things50 3.1.9 Race relations52 3.1.10 School53 3.2 School talk55 3.2.1 Teacher-student interaction55 3.2.2 Classroom chat56 3.3 Family talk57 3.3.1 Introduction57 3.3.2 How they talk at home58 3.3.3 The generation gap60 3.4 Summing up61 Chapter 4 Slanguage 4.1 Slang67 4.1.1 General67 4.1.2 Slang in COLT68 4.2 Swearing76 4.2.1 Swearing in COLT78 4.3 Vague words86 4.3.1 General86 4.3.2 Vague words in COLT88 4.3.3 Placeholders94 4.3.4 Set markers99 4.4 Summing up105 Chapter 5 Variation in the use of reported speech 5.1 Markers of reported speech108 5.2 Mimickry and zero-quotations110 5.3 The quotative marker (be) like115 5.4 Reporting verbs: go vs say118 5.4.1 Are go and say equivalent? Grammatical differences119 5.4.2 Variation in tense, aspect and standardness121 5.4.3 Correlation with mimickry and sound effects123
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5.4.4 5.4.5
Social parameters125 Another related use of go128
Chapter 6 Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers 131 6.1 Non-standard grammatical features131 6.1.1 The Reading and London teenage vernaculars compared133 6.1.2 Two socio-economic groups compared135 6.2 On the trendy use of intensifiers139 6.2.1 Teenagers, adults and intensifiers141 6.2.2 Girls, boys and intensifiers142 6.2.3 Some ‘teenage-specific’ intensifiers144 6.3 Summing up161 Chapter 7 Teenagers’ use of tags 7.1 Why tags?167 7.1.1 Functional plethora: The innit story167 7.1.2 The use of yeah as a tag172 7.1.3 The use of eh as a tag176 7.1.4 The use of okay as a tag178 7.1.5 The use of right as a tag180 7.1.6 Survey of invariant tags and their associated functions183 7.2 The distribution of tags in COLT184 7.2.1 Age185 7.2.2 Gender187 7.2.3 Social class188 7.2.4 Ethnicity189 7.2.5 Location190 7.3 Summing up191 Chapter 8 Ritual conflict 8.1 Gender, class and race195 8.2 Data and methodology197 8.2.1 Mitigating strategies198 8.2.2 Aggravating strategies199 8.3 Ritual conflict in COLT200
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8.3.1 Tough girls’ talk200 8.3.2 Sex talk and communicating norms205 8.4 Summing up208 Chapter 9 Conclusion
211
References
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Appendix
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Index
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Introduction Why study teenage talk?
They like wanna see how we talk and all that. Tommy, 14
In March 1996, Alex Spillius of The Independent on Sunday said of London teenage talk: It appears that a yawning linguistic gap is opening up to separate a younger generation — brought up on a mixture of US television, films and music, Australian soap operas and rave culture — from the rest of the population.
Of course, adults have always complained about teenage language, without necessarily being aware of what exactly it is that distinguishes the language of teenagers from their own, more standard, language. According to The Independent on Sunday, the intonation is different for a start: teenage sentences tend to end with a raised rather than a lowered tone. But it is vocabulary that is seen to most strikingly characterize their language. For instance, teenagers use like as a ‘sentential link’ where adults might use you know, and go instead of say as a reporting verb; they use old words such as sad and wicked with new meanings; and they use innit, ‘the phrase that annoys parents most’, as an invariable tag, as illustrated below: Callum:
Mamady: Callum: Mamady: Callum: Mamady: Callum:
It’s not that good, cos it’s either Final Fight Cody or you have to be Hagar or you can only pick out of Hagar and Cody or it’s Final Fight Guy where you can only be Hagar or Guy. No, but you only like Cody or Hagar innit Mm, I know but …it’s so stupid though innit? You didn’t like Guy ·unclearÒ I know, but that is so stupid though innit? No, it depends on the game pl= player. So what erm
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Jacob: Callum:
Erm Fatal Fury. Mm that’s okay.
(137803: 182–188)
So far, teenage language has not been given the attention in linguistic circles that it merits. Admittedly, there has been an awakening and gradually increasing interest in teenage talk in the last decade — and not only English teenage talk. However, compared to the amount of research devoted to child and adult language, the number of studies on teenage language is modest indeed. This is startling, considering the significance of this transition period between childhood and adulthood in terms of its effect, not only on physical and psychological development, but also on social and linguistic behaviour. As every parent knows, this is when the peer group becomes all-important, exerting pressure on the way youngsters dress, the music they listen to, and, of course, the way they speak. Teenage talk is fascinating. It is the nearest we can get to ‘the vernacular’ (cf. Cheshire 1982: 6f; Milroy 1987: 58). Moreover, occupying an intermediary position between child and adult language, it has the potential to influence the way language develops. Some, at least, of the many innovations in teenage talk — which are found at all levels of speech — work their way into the standard language. In Hudson’s words, ‘it is the peer-oriented stage which lays the basis for the adult language…’ (1980: 16). The dearth of investigations into teenage language is due in part to its under-representation in language corpora. It was to address this that the decision was taken to collect a reasonably large corpus of teenage language and make it available for research, thus giving rise to the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT). We found it natural to choose teenage talk from London and not, for instance, Newcastle or Cardiff or Manchester, since London is one of the world’s most ‘central’ and trendiest cities. Its teenage vernacular, we assumed, must infiltrate the language of teenagers far beyond London’s boundaries, and even those of Britain itself. This book aims at laying at least a stone or two in bridging the gap referred to in The Independent on Sunday, by giving a comprehensive insight into the London teenage vernacular towards the end of the 20th century. The book consists of two parts. In the first part (Chapters 1–3), we describe how the corpus was collected and processed until we arrived at the final output, the CD-ROM, which includes the orthographically transcribed and word-class tagged text, a sound file and a search program. We go on to present the speakers,
Introduction
with special emphasis on the recruits (who wore the recording material and logged the conversations) and their various backgrounds. The first part ends colourfully, describing what the COLT teenagers talk about and how they do it. The second part of the book, the main part, is devoted to specific linguistic findings on the most prominent features of the teenagers’ talk. Chapter 4 is devoted to ‘slanguage’, including proper and dirty slang alongside vogue words and the ever-present ‘smallwords’ of speech, such as OK, like, sort of and yeah. This is followed in Chapter 5 by an account of how reported speech is manifested in teenage talk. Chapter 6 starts by a survey of non-standard grammatical features and is followed by a description of the teenagers’ use of intensifiers. ‘Tags’, such as don’t you and innit, are discussed in Chapter 7. Chapter 8, finally, is a lively description of the teenagers’ interactional behaviour in terms of conflict talk. Chapter 9, the summary, concludes the book.
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Chapter 1
From tape to CD-ROM
Oh dear, I’ve got so much to do tonight, got so much to do tonight, gotta have a bath gotta record some tapes, gotta record these tapes gotta record some other tapes gotta do some homework. Mandy, 15
Leaving a tape recorder in the hands of a teenager is risky. For one thing, you never know if you will ever get the tape recorder back in one piece, and if you do, you never know what will be on the tape. The COLT teenagers really gave us a new understanding of what tape recorders can be used for, and not least how much a tape recorder can actually handle when it comes to physical abuse. Hitting the microphone or whistling into it while recording surely produces interesting sound effects:1 (1) ·nvÒwhistling sound·/nvÒ When I go too close to it makes that noise. Look Lo= Listen to this. Listen to this, you won’t believe it. Look. See that. ·nvÒwhistling·/nvÒ out your ears. ·nvÒwhistling sound·/nvÒ See … you’re not gonna like it Walkman. ·nvÒwhistling sound·/nvÒ you can hardly hear it but when you get it against your ear it stings. (138201: 39)
The teenagers who were recorded did not seem to be intimidated by the presence of a walkman, or the fact that the recordings were to be handed in to an adult research team from Norway. In fact, our status as Norwegians turned out to be an advantage; we were just a bunch of ‘Norwegies’ from a remote and insignificant viking land, where probably nobody understands English anyway: (2) Gareth: Can you turn it off a minute? Can you turn it off a minute? Robert: No. I’m recording everything. [Come with me.] Brett: [I won’t say] anything!
1.For transcription conventions, see Appendix 1.
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Robert: Come on, in fact they’ll be Norwegians and they won’t be able to understand anything you say! (139809: 79)
Mitch and Ion think that the recordings are to be used by Norwegian pupils learning English in school. But they are not quite sure how useful it will be for Norwegian kids to learn their street language: (3) Ion: so Norwegians they’re learning English don’t they though Mitch: oh yeah … oh, but, yeah but, this is gonna be done mostly on the streets innit, for us? so what they gonna learn about that? (136301: 24–28)
Mandy is of a different opinion: what could possibly be more interesting than her language? (4) Don: Mandy: Don: Alphie: Mandy:
Are you getting paid for this? No. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ I just did it for a laugh. Tell them [to fuck off.] [You’re not getting] paid for it! No I just did it for a laugh cos I want, I want everyone to know the most interesting language in the world which is part of my language isn’t it?
(133904: 26–30)
The launching of the COLT project was preceded by a workshop on corpus building and corpus-based research organized at Bergen University in November 1992 by the Department of English in collaboration with the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities and with financial support from the Faculty of Arts. Six well-known linguists with long experience of corpus-related work were invited to introduce us to the art of corpus creation and corpus use, notably Jan Arts (the TOSCA project), Paul Crowdy (the British National Corpus (BNC)), Sidney Greenbaum (the International Corpus of English (ICE)), Stig Johansson (the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus (LOB)), John Sinclair (COBUILD) and Jan Svartvik (the London-Lund Corpus (LLC)). A grant from the Norwegian Research Council enabled us to launch the project and employ a student research assistant on a half time basis. Additional funding from various other sources2 made it possible for us to employ a
2.COLT has also been funded by the Norwegian Academy of Science, the Meltzer foundation and the Faculty of Arts at Bergen University.
From tape to CD-ROM
number of future MA and PhD students as research assistants during the project period. All in all, the COLT project has been kept alive by fairly small means, and we would definitely not have been able to complete the project in an acceptable way without assistance from outside, notably the Longman Group, Harlow (for transcription), the Department of Linguistics at Lancaster University (for word-class tagging) and the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities3 (for technical support).
1.1 Getting teenage talk on tape The collection of COLT was largely modelled on the Longman design for collecting the BNC, and we used the same type of equipment (see Crowdy 1991 for details). The scope, of course, was different. Instead of recording conversations in different areas of Britain, we restricted ourselves to different London areas; instead of recording all age groups, we limited ourselves to teenagers; instead of trying to cover the full range of linguistic variation, we aimed at the London teenage vernacular; and instead of using the British Market Research Bureau for the selection of suitable volunteers to do the recording, we contacted the Department of Education in London. Altogether, our corpus design has been far less sophisticated than that of the BNC, and the size of the corpus is only a fraction of that of the BNC. The Department of Education helped us pick five London school boroughs, each representing one rung of the social status ladder: Barnet, Camden, Chelsey/Kensington, Hackney and Tower Hamlets. The Education Directorates in these boroughs provided us with a list of schools to approach. The heads of the schools were then contacted and presented with a brief outline of the project and its aims and purposes and asked to help us find pupils who were willing to act as ‘recruits’, i.e. make the recordings. The reactions varied. Some headmasters and headmistresses showed great interest in the project, while others were less enthusiastic. Least willing to cooperate were the heads of schools with the highest prestige. We eventually ended up with the following school boroughs: The Inner City Area Barnet Camden
3.The present name is the HIT centre.
3
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Hackney Tower Hamlets The Greater London Metropolitan Area Hertfordshire Figure 1.1, copied from the Internet,4 gives an idea of where the boroughs are situated.
Figure 1.1.The London boroughs
The inner city schools are all state-run comprehensive schools, while the one in Hertfordshire is a (public) boarding-school. Altogether thirty-three pupils declared that they were willing to act as recruits, despite the fact that there was no payment involved. They all received a letter for their parents to sign, saying that they authorized their son/daughter to act as a recruit. It goes without saying that the students were promised full anonymity. The recordings were made in the late spring and early autumn of 1993 and consist of approximately half a million words of spontaneous conversations between 13 to 17 year-old boys and girls from different parts of London and with varying socioeconomic backgrounds. Some of the conversations, however,
4.The internet address is http://www.brent.gov.uk/brent/brent/brent/other/londonmap.htm
From tape to CD-ROM
include the occasional parent, sibling or teacher (see Chapter 2). The first research assistant employed by the COLT project visited each one of the schools, gave instructions and handed out the recording equipment to the recruits, a small Sony Walkman Professional combined with a lapel microphone, together with a set of empty tapes, and a ‘conversation log’. The recruits were instructed to carry this equipment for three to five days and record all the conversations they were engaged in, in as many different situations as possible, preferably with friends of their own age and, if possible, without any of the co-speakers noticing that they were being recorded. The recruits were also asked to write down in the conversation log who they were talking to by indicating first name, occupation, age, sex and relationship, and where the conversation took place. After the period of time allotted, the tapes were handed back, more or less filled with recorded speech and with speech of varying sound quality. Some recruits had done a very good job, especially Susie (recruit 2) and Jack (recruit 29), who managed to record roughly one tenth each of the entire corpus and whose recordings were of very good quality. Two other recruits had been less successful. One handed in a set of empty tapes, and the tapes of the other recruit were impossible to transcribe due to the bad sound quality. Thus, we were left with thirty sets of tapes, ready to be transcribed — and one missing Sony Walkman. Surprisingly enough, most of the recruits noted down the information asked for in the conversation log, but some did not bother to give all the details and wrote something very general, such as ‘all are school mates’ for co-speakers, and one of the recruits contented himself with only filling in the names of the co-speakers, leaving out all other information. The majority of the recruits made their recordings in or outside the school building, for instance in the classroom, the common room, the canteen, or the school yard. Some took the easy way out and simply turned on the tape-recorder in class, which means that much of the talk was produced by the teacher. Others made all their recordings at home, which explains the broad age-range in some of the conversations. Many of the recordings are labelled ‘walking home, ‘outside flats’, entrance to flats’, and ‘park’, which indicates that the recruis spent a lot of time with their friends outdoors. Wyatt (recruit 9), recorded quite a few of his conversations in his father’s pub, with co-speakers aged up to 45. All in all, the sampling took no more than three weeks, two weeks in May and one week in September. The research assistant who administered the May recordings, made the observation that these recordings reflect the teenagers’ life style just as much as their conversational style; the teenagers were simply too active to sit down and have a quiet talk. The September recordings were made
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in a more stable environment, the recruits’ respective studies at the boarding school, which is reflected in longer and more coherent conversations. The number of speakers per recording varies from two to six, with twoparty conversations the least common type. The conversations where girls talk to girls and boys talk to boys dominate, but quite a few are mixed. The conversations recorded at home may include a parent and/or a sibling, while classroom recordings usually involve a teacher, as illustrated in (5), which shows that the teacher does not really appreciate the presence of a tape-recorder in the classroom: (5) Teacher: Carola: Teacher: Carola: Teacher: Carola: Teacher: Carola: Teacher: Carola: Teacher: Carola: Teacher:
No you’re not allowed to have them in school. I am cos Mr Smith er said I could. Why? Cos we’re doing this project for the Norwegian thing. But you’re not allowed to walk around the school with a Walkman, do take it off now. We are, it said on the thing. On what thing? The instructions I got is that no Walkmen are allowed in school. Have to fill up ten tapes. Yeah but are you supposed to be wearing it around the school? Yeah you have to record as many conversations as you can. You have to fill up ten tapes. Who is it for, Mr? Brown. Alright well I’ll check one out.
(140804: 54–67)
The recordings represent various kinds of interaction, ranging from exchanges that can hardly be characterized as coherent conversations at all, such as some of the outside recordings, to what might be described as serious discussions. Although the co-speakers were not supposed to notice that they were being recorded, it is very obvious that they did more often that not. But this does not seem to have made them less spontaneous. On the contrary. Awareness of being recorded seems to have encouraged the male speakers in particular to be bolder than ever by telling dirty jokes or indulging in the use of taboo words. The sound quality of the recordings varies a great deal, from excellent to rather poor. Some recordings were of such poor quality that they could not be transcribed. The main reason was of course that the recruits had switched on the tape recorder in very noisy places. Another reason is the teenagers’ interactional
From tape to CD-ROM
style, which abounds in shouting, swearing, overlaps and interruptions. As a result, the material still has a number of ·unclearÒ instances, which, however, the attentive analyst may be able to disambiguate by careful listening. Two thirds of the recruits were 13 and 14 years old, while the remaining third was distributed among the 15 and 16–17 year-olds. This points to a clear distributional imbalance as regards age. However, the fact that the 13 and 14 year-olds represent all three social classes (see Table 2.1) makes them a perfect target for sociolinguistic comparisons involving the entire socioeconomic range. This group handed in more recorded material than the other age groups together. All in all, two thirds of the recruits belong to social class 2 (middle, which seems to indicate that one can expect very little material from class 1 (high) and class 3 (low). This, however, is compensated by an overall better quality. The overall gender distribution, too, is unbalanced, since the male recruits were twice as many as the female. But this is not as bad as it seems either. The nine female recruits managed to record no less than 44 per cent of the entire corpus, compared to the male recruits’ 56 per cent, and again, the quality is generally better than that of many of the conversations recorded by male recruits. As we have shown, collecting a corpus of spontaneous conversation is a hazardous undertaking, and despite careful planning, it is impossible to foresee the outcome. In other words, we could not anticipate how many students would volunteer to help, how much each one of them would record, or the quality of the recordings. Some shortcomings could obviously have been avoided if we had had the resources to collect and process a larger body of material. This would have enabled us to select the most representative recordings, thus achieving the right balance. However, for practical reasons, including time and money restrictions, we set the limit to half a million words, which, incidentally, is the same size as the LLC.
1.2 Transcription The transcription of the recorded material turned out to be a complicated and very time-consuming process. This was partly due to the poor quality of some of the recordings and partly to features characteristic of teenage talk. Lack of adequate funding and a consequent change of direction were additional factors. At the outset, we had fairly high ambitions. We aimed at a simple prosodic transcription reflecting the spoken language, roughly midway between the BNC model, according to which utterances are transcribed as sentences (cf. Crowdy
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1991), and the LLC model (cf. Svartvik & Quirk 1980), which goes into great prosodic detail (cf. Haslerud & Stenström 1995: 239 for a description). Although this model was fairly simple and straightforward, we realized that it would take far too long to implement, unless we could afford more staff, which was not the case. To our great relief, the Longman Group offered to let their transcribers, ‘a team of audio keyboarders using WP word processing software’ (Crowdy 1991: 21), who were trained to do the orthographic transcription of the BNC, do the work for us in exchange for data. The transcription was done in three steps: – – –
by the Longman team following the BNC model by the Bergen team editing by the Bergen team adding prosody.
Step 1 The transcription scheme adopted for the BNC involves a broad orthographic transcription ‘with little prosodic information and no phonetic features marked’ (cf. Crowdy 1991: 5), based on ‘sentence-like units’ instead of ‘intonation units’. One might argue that this kind of transcription makes conversation look more like written dialogue than spontaneous speech. However, the fact that it does not hide such typical features of speech as ellipsis, repetition, new starts, and anaphora, and that it provides information in terms of pauses (marked b a comma or a full stop), intonational contours (full stop for a fall, comma of a slight rise, question mark of questioning and exclamation mark for exclamatory utterances) makes it acceptable for most research, unless it is aimed at phonology. ·1Ò ·2Ò ·1Ò ·2Ò ·1Ò ·2Ò
He’s as changeable as the weather. Who me? No ·nameÒ Well I’ll think about it then. Yeah he’s the kind of person you fancy and you think, no, I don’t no ·unclearÒ it’s just such a dilemma. I do actually quite fancy ·nameÒ, I don’t want to but I do. What are you doing? Oh you’re just so good. ·1Ò With my left hand in a fist. ·2Ò ·laughterÒ Mm.
Figure 1.2.Transcription according to the BNC transcription scheme
From tape to CD-ROM
The transcription process was not without problems. An average transcription rate of 750 words per hour, which worked for the BNC recordings, was not possible when transcribing COLT. The Longman transcribers complained about the difficulty of identifying what the teenagers were talking about. What contributed to the difficulty was of course that the recording conditions had not always been ideal. The inevitable result was that the transcription took much longer than anticipated.
Step 2 When the transcribed material finally reached Bergen, it was up to the COLT team to listen to the recordings and check that the transcripts were correct. This is not to say that the updated version of COLT is perfect, but a large number of mistakes have been corrected and a large number of passages marked ·unclearÒ have bee properly transcribed. In other words, this version is not only more accurate but also contains more words than the version that is included in the BNC. After the final check, the corpus had increased by nearly 20 per cent. ·u who=12 id=175Ò ·u who= 1 id=176Ò ·u who=12 id=177Ò ·u who= 1 id=178Ò ·u who=12 id=179Ò ·u who 1 id=180Ò
·u who= 12 id=181Ò ·u who= 1 id=182Ò
He’s as changeable as the weather. Who me? No Colin. Oh. Yeah. Well I’ll think ·unclearÒ have to do … mm. Yeah he’s the kind of person you fancy. The you think, no, I don’t know no. I don’t ·unclearÒ him but maybe. Maybe, I don’t know … It’s just such a dilemma. I do actually quite fancy Johnny, yeah. I don’t want to but I do. How are you doing? Oh you’re just so good. Here’s one left hand in a fist. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒMm.
Figure 1.3.The corrected version of the Longman transcription
Step 3 We did not want to give up our primary aim altogether, i.e. to provide a simplified prosodic analysis of the material. But we had to be realistic and decided to limit the prosodic transcription to a subcorpus constituting 25 per cent
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of the COLT corpus. The subcorpus was selected so that the percentages of age, sex, an social class would match that of the larger corpus. The prosodic transcription is illustrated in Figure 1.4. ·u who=12 id=175Ò ·u who= 1 id=176Ò ·u who=12 id=177Ò ·u who= 1 id=178Ò ·u who=12 id=179Ò ·u who= 1 id=180Ò
·u who= 12 id=181Ò ·u who= 1 id=182Ò
he’s as ch/angeable as the w\eather# who m\e# no C\olin# \oh#. y\eah#. well I’ll th\ink ·unclearÒ have to do# … _mm# y\eah# he’s the kind of person you f\ancy# the you think n\o#, I don’t kn_ow#, no. I don’t ·\unclearÒ him# but m\aybe# m\aybe# I don’t kn_ow# … It’s just such a dil\/emma#. I d\o actually quite fancy J/immy, yeah#. I don’t w\ant to# but I d\o# how are y_ou doing# oh you’re just so g_ood# here’s one left h\and# in a f\ist#. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ _mm#.
Figure 1.4.Prosodic transcription
1.3 Tagging COLT was tagged for word classes by the team at Lancaster University who tagged the BNC and was consequently tagged in the same way. This version of COLT, like the orthographic version transcribed by the Longman Group, is part of the BNC. The tagset used, a variant of CLAWS, referred to as the ‘C6 tagset’, consists of 138 word tags and eleven punctuation tags. Figure 1.5 illustrates an extract from the tagged version, where 14-year old Susie (W1), Sharon (W2) and Warren (W3) are having a chat. Some words are less easily tagged than others. Compare for instance the tagging of yes and no with that of of course, Why should of course be tagged in a different way? And consider the word like, which has received no less than five labels; it has been tagged as a general preposition (II), as a general adjective (JJ), as a general adverb (RR), as an infinitive VV1), and as a base verb form VV0). But, as will appear in Part II of the present volume, these tags still do not tell the whole truth as regards the functions of like.
From tape to CD-ROM
|wW2 |wW3 |wW1 |wW3
Do_VD0 you_PPY like_VV1 me_PPIO1 Warren_NP1? Yes_UH or_CC no_UH? you_PPY doVD0n’t_XX Yes_UH! Warren_NP1? Do_VD0 you_PPY like_VV1 me_PPIO1? Of course_RR
Figure 1.5.Word class tagging VDO: base form of DO; PPY: 2nd person personal pronoun; VV1: infinitive; PPIO1: 1st person singular objective personal pronoun; NPI: singular proper noun; UH: interjection; RR: general adverb.
1.4 CD-ROM production The final version of COLT, containing the texts hyperlinked to digital sound files, is now available on the Web and on CD-ROM. In order to achieve this, we first converted the sound from tape to digital sound files on a PC. In this process the actual sound was partly amplified and much improved, and the amount of noice was reduced by means of the CoolEdit software. The sound files were stored in WAV-format (mono, 16bit solution, 22 kHz sampling). We produced one sound file per text, and the whole material ended up as 16 CD disks, initially requiring about 9 GB disk space. The actual alignment of sound files and text was carried out at SoftSound in England. The alignment was done automatically by means of speech recognition technology. From SoftSound we received files where the words and utterances in COLT were annotated with a time code containing exact information about the temporal positioning of the word/utterance in the sound file. We then spot checked the text/sound alignment and corrected some mistakes. The texts were then converted to the format applied in the University of Stuttgart’s Corpus WorkBench (CWB), preserving the time codes and tag information as positional attributes. A web-based interface was produced that can play any fragment of a sound file via the World Wide Web. The user can make a concordance search in the text database and have the corresponding sound played by clicking a web link. The sound is produced in the compressed MP3-format. The sound files have also been split into 10-seconds long segments. These shorter sound files, along with a HTML-version of the texts, are now also available in the COLT CD-ROM-package, containing three disks. As in the Internet version, the texts are linked to sound files via hyperlinks. The CDs contain all available verisons of COLT, including the word-class tagged and prosodic versions. These CDs are now commercially available.
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Chapter 2
The speakers
Wonder if they realise that upper class teenagers like us say ‘fuck’ rather a lot. Brett, 16
Any person who has travelled around Metropolitan London will recognise differences in social standards between the various boroughs of the city. A major social divide exists for instance between the West End and East London, and similar differences can be observed if one compares heavily urbanised and so-called ‘deprived’ boroughs to more fashionable areas. London is also extremely ethnically heterogeneous, and ethnicity and area of residence are significant constituents in a person’s background. This chapter deals with the non-linguistic parameters that we consider to be relevant to the study of adolescent conversation, and gives a brief survey of the social and ethnic fabric that makes up the set of young Londoners who participate in the COLT conversations.
2.1 Social differences: Do the teenagers care? Naturally, it must have been a strange experience for the recruits to be handpicked for a language research project. On the one hand, they were proud to be among the chosen few (as Susie said: ‘they picked me!’). Some were also proud of their language, such as Mandy, who told a friend: ‘I want everyone to know the most interesting language in the world which is part of my language isn’t it?’. On the other hand, many recruits kept asking themselves ‘what do they want our language for?’ As some of them observed, teenagers mainly ‘talk bullshit’, they swear a lot and use slang excessively, and they can have ‘like an hour’s discussion on totally nothing’. In other words, many teenagers were aware that their language has low prestige. They were also aware that universities and researchers have high prestige, and so the whole idea of a high-prestige adult institution wanting low-prestige teenage ‘crap conversations’ naturally seemed paradoxical to many of them. Now, our alleged prestige was somehow
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Trends in Teenage Talk
undermined by the ‘alien factor’ of the research team being ‘a bunch of Norgees’, who, according to Robert, ‘probably don’t understand English anyway’. Taking these conflicting factors into consideration, most of the teenagers seemed to end up with the feeling that they were crossing the border between high-prestige and low-prestige language usage/expectations, but that it did not matter, since they were doing it ‘all in the name of science’. As sociolinguists, we are inclined to take aspects of social background as a starting point for the description of linguistic variation. In fact, the COLT conversations reveal that social differences (widely defined) are also a concern of the teenagers themselves: (6) Karna: Susie: Karna:
Oh my God! Elsie’s been screwing that upper class twat! Yeah, what’s his name? It’s Keith or summat.
(132602: 41–43)
(7) Brett: Nicolas:
Come on. Nick a few. No. We’re upper class teenagers Brett.
(142103: 299–300)
(8) Anne: Carola:
You common types wouldn’t know what intellectual people wear. ·laughingÒCamden town residents.·/Ò
(140809: 68–71)
(9) Tommy:
Regina: Tommy:
Right in school yeah, erm, after, they gave us these yeah, and they like wanna see like how we talk and all that. [You know] [Yeah.] rastafarian style and all.
(139501: 11–13)
(10) Johnny: Nicolas: Johnny: Brett: many: Pierre: Johnny: Pierre:
I’m in set free for French. Set free. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Three! Set three for science. Spelt F R E E. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ [Johnny you’re on a linguistic ·unclearÒ] [I’m in, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in] I’m in, I’m in the same set, I’m in the same set for him as maths. M A F S.
(142101: 209–219)
The speakers
(11) Elliot: Jack:
You know, they’re really nice people but they’re really, s= speak really sad. Yeah. I suppose when you’re used to erm, you know middle class, ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ being a right snob here but, when you’re used to erm, people at school, and then you go back to people in Essex then, I suppose, it’s a bit difficult.
(142002: 196–201)
(12) ·mimicking Northern accentÒI’m Rashira and I come from Birmingham. Ay, ay get off like, ay. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Ay, ay calm down ay. Ay alright alright alright.·/Ò (140901: 45)
(13) Please could you refrain from using such offensive language in my vicinity. (142101: 325)
(14) Now for some fucking dirty swear! Woooooh! You fucking bitch! You Irish bastard. (135905: 1)
In our opinion, these extracts provide good indications of the teenagers’ awareness of social, regional and ethnic differences in their community, as well as linguistic features that reflect such differences. This can be seen from their reference to such concepts as ‘upper class’, ‘Camden Town residents’ and ‘rastafarian style’, as mentioned in (6)–(9). The examples also show that the teenagers are able to recognise, and appreciate, linguistic features that are manifestations of social, regional and ethnic differences. In (10), Nicolas, Pierre and the others are ‘taking the mickey’ out of Johnny for his low-prestige pronunciation of the fricative [f] instead of [θ] in words such as three and maths, as is common in the London dialect. Examples (11) and (12) show that the young speakers have observed differences between a ‘sad’ dialect and the way they speak themselves, and that they are able to exploit such differences in cheerful mimickry. Finally, (13) and (14) show the (perhaps ironical) rejection or endorsement of ‘bad’ language. In fact, we were quite surprised to find such a degree of language-consciousness among the teenagers, which is also evident in several metalinguistic discussions concerning their own language, and the parent generation’s attitudes towards it: (15) Bradley: Elliot:
I always say like a bit myself you [know.] [Oh] like.
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Trends in Teenage Talk
Bradley: Jack: Bradley:
You know like this and like that, [and, like] [like this,] bit like that. And my mum my da= g= my dad starts going like, like, like, and they go what d’you do ·laughingÒyou know·/Ò. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ
(141606: 58–62)
As regards class membership, we first get the impression that some speakers are conscious of their social affiliation: (16) Bradley: Nicolas: Brett:
It’s a linguistic thing to find out how [upper class exclusive teenagers speak.] [We’re, we’re known as upper class teenagers.] ·mimickingÒOh, oh we’re upper class teenagers are we now? Oh that’s fantastic·/Ò
(142103: 217–219)
But these descriptions are likely to be ironical, as indicated by Brett’s use of a positive polarity tag question, suggesting a sarcastic attitude. Our assumption that these self-reports on social class are ironical is supported by the fact that Nicolas and his friends actually sometimes brag about their bad behaviour and poor performance in school, suggesting that, in some respects at least, they are inclined to so-called ‘burnout’ tendencies. But their actual interests and discussion topics (e.g. complaints about how few people actually show up at morning service) suggest the contrary. For instance, Brett and Rick are members of a school choir, while the others joke about the choir being a ‘squeak society’ (for castrate singers): (17) Johnny: Brett: Bradley: Rick: Johnny: Brett: Johnny: Brett: Johnny: (…)
We can’t have a squeak in this room. Get out. I’m not a fucking squeak, I’m just in a choir. ·laughingÒYeah, precisely·/Ò. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Ah that just shows your ignorance dunnit really? Yeah I’m a member of that one. Shows my ignorance? Yeah if you weren’t ignorant you’d know there’s four parts to a choir and not just one castrate section. And you’re in the Castro section? ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ No I’m not. With a laugh like that you’ve gotta be.
The speakers
Rick:
Bradley:
Actually I tell you one good thing about being in this choir yeah, I’m in this little choir tonight, chamber choir yeah, which is only about, which is only about like eight or nine people yeah? Oh so you’re the crème de la choir
(142103: 449–457 & 142104: 84–89)
In our opinion, this example also wonderfully illustrates the playfulness of several of the COLT speakers, and their sense of humour and verbal creativity. Given the examples above, it is obvious that the teenagers are far from ignorant as to the importance of the relation between social features and language features.1 The corpus provides massive evidence that, despite their young age, they have developed an awareness of social aspects of their lives and of sociolinguistic patterns. Our general impression is that the teenagers put an effort into expressing their identity as young Londoners, in ways that are playful, creative and innovative. In the current study we aim to describe a number of ways in which the teenagers do so, by considering the linguistic manifestations of this general tendency. Often they do so with a great portion of irony. Examples (7)–(8), for instance, seem to involve an insincere description of their own group affiliation — as if to suggest not how the teenagers look upon themselves, but to describe mockingly the common aspirations of adults or other people (the aspirations of being among ‘intellectual people’ or ‘upper class’). This seems more a reflection of an ironical stance towards the values of the mainstream society, with its appreciation of upward social mobility, than of the teenagers’ own aspirations. Similarly, from a cognitive perspective, this usage reveals teenagers’ capability of expressing themselves in ironical ways, showing not only that they have developed a capacity for exploiting their own verbal and interactional skills at expressing irony, but also showing a level of critical awareness of the values of the adult society that lies ahead. The examples quoted above indicate that the teenagers have their own opinions about what constitutes teenage language and, more generally, that language is sensitive to the age parameter. The recordings reveal that they focus
1.This is supported by Kerswill & Williams’ (1997) interviews with British teenagers about group membership and social class, which show that adults are ‘seen in a relatively undifferentiated fashion’ (1997: 168), and some teenagers regard the socially diverse school student body as ‘a linguistically homogenous group’ (1997: 168). This, however, does not apply to the working class students they interviewed, as they appeared to be more concerned with social differences and distinguished between their own group and their ‘posh’ classmates.
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Trends in Teenage Talk
metalinguistically on four main linguistic aspects: the swear words, the slang words, the discourse markers, and (primarily phonological) dialect features. Judging by how much they comment on it, the single most salient feature of teenage talk is the swearing, while the second feature is the use of slang, which also hold to be generation-specific. These features are devoted their own chapter in this book; cf. Chapter 4. Thirdly, as we have partly seen already, some speakers comment on their own use of the discourse markers like and yeah, and well as an intensifier (without using these labels, of course!). And finally, they comment on regional dialect features. As regards non-linguistic parameters, we have chosen to focus mainly on the ‘big four’ of classical sociolinguistic studies, namely age, gender, social class and ethnicity, as well as location within Greater London. However, it is not altogether certain that these are the most relevant factors to describe adolescent social structure. Belonging to a network of friends is equally important to them, and their preferences, sympathies, likes and dislikes, are generally not as much constrained by the social status of their parents as of the social patterns that the youngsters invent for themselves. (Cf. Eckert 1988, 1997. For further discussion, see Andersen 2001.) Most important of all in this respect is the immediate peer group. Teenagers generally have a drive towards peer group conformity and attempt to avoid social stigma. They wish to be seen as distinct from both the adult world and from other teenage groups. The pioneering studies of Penny Eckert (1988, 1997), carried out by ethnographic method in American schools, show that, both as regards the ways in which teenagers are looked upon and how they look upon themselves, it makes sense to distinguish between the two major groups called ‘jocks’ and ‘burnouts’ (as well as a group of ‘in-betweens’). These are self-instantiating groups whose affiliation essentially reflects the teenagers’ aspirations in career, manifested by their behaviour in school and leisure activities, as well as language. The adherence to jock or burnout group norms constitutes a crucial social divide that greatly affects the linguistic and other behaviour of teenage groups, more so than the socioeconomic status of their parents.
2.2 Social background: What does the corpus tell us? Most of what we know about the social background of the recruits stems from the log books and a personal data sheet that they were asked to fill out, a task which most of them took seriously, but not everyone:
The speakers
(18) Mandy: Joel: Don: Brett: Don: Joel:
What shall I say our occupation is? Buggered. Completely buggered. No we’re students. We’re buggered as well but we’re ·unclearÒ Buggered students. Put tossers … That about sums it up, don’t you reckon?
(134103: 5–12)
(19) Erm, occupation. What’s your job, prostitute? Yeah fine. Erm living on the streets? Yes. (133704: 29)
In the ideal case, the log books contain speaker-specific information concerning the recruit’s age, residence and gender, as well as information about his or her parents (occupation, employed/unemployed) and who the conversational partners were. The personal data sheet is shown in Appendix 2. 2.2.1 Age and gender COLT has been designed to represent the language of London teenagers, and most of the conversations involve only the recruits and their nearest friends and classmates. However, the recruits‘ younger or older family members, as well as teachers and even a few strangers, take part in some of the conversations (cf. Chapter 3). As a result, the speakers that are actually classified with respect to age range from one to 59 years old. Since some age groups are represented with very low word counts, we find it convenient to bundle together some of the occurring values of the age parameter. We divide the speakers into six different age groups, labelled preadolescence (0–9), early adolescence (10–13), middle adolescence (14–16), late adolescence (17–19), young adults (20–29) and older adults (30+). The distribution of text across the various age groups is as shown in Figure 2.1. (For details, see Table 2.1 below). Only three of these age groups, early, middle and late adolescence, represent the target group of the current study. 85 per cent of the corpus material is produced by speakers within these age groups. The preadolescent group accounts for a very small amount of text (1,855 words), and the same goes for the young adult group (1,138 words). The older adult group, consisting mainly of parents and teachers, contributes about six per cent of the corpus material. As regards gender, the female and the male speakers in COLT contribute roughly the same amount of text: the male speakers 51.8 per cent and the female speakers 48.2 per cent.
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Trends in Teenage Talk
Young adult 0%
Older adult 6%
Late adolescence 9%
Preadolescence 0% Early adolescence 24%
Middle adolescence 61%
Figure 2.1.Distribution of COLT text material in the various age groups
2.2.2 Borough of residence and social class The COLT conversations are classified with respect to both the borough of residence of the recruits and the borough where they go to school. The five schools that took part in the COLT project are located in Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Camden, Barnet and Hertfordshire. The residential boroughs include Barnet, Brent, Camden, Enfield, Hackney, Hertfordshire, Islington, Richmond, Tower Hamlets and Westminster. For most of the recruits, residential borough is identical with school borough, but some recruits attend schools in a borough that is different from their residential borough. This applies in particular to the group of Hertfordshire boarding school pupils, whose conversations were mostly recorded at the school and not in their homes.2 For these recruits, the school borough classification yields a more satisfactory and reliable indicator of group membership, since adolescents are more likely to identify with classmates than with parents and are thus likely to adapt to the language of their network of friends in these conversations, rather than to the norms of their parents and people in their residential area. The social classification of the COLT recruits that we have applied divides them into three different social groups, conveniently labelled ‘high’, ‘middle’
2.It also applies to a small group of recruits who travel from Brent, Islington or Westminster and attend the school in Camden.
The speakers
and ‘low’. This classification is based on three pieces of information from the personal data sheet: residential borough, parents’ occupation and whether the parents are employed or not. As this information was provided for no other speakers than the recruits themselves, only the recruits and their families are classified with respect to social class. The social class index is a complex one, calculated by means of figures from the Key statistics for local authorities, Great Britain (Office of Population Censuses and Surveys:1994). The information regarding parents’ occupation is treated in accordance with The Standard Occupational Classification (Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS): 1991). The full description of the calculation of the social class index is described in Stenström et al. (1998). As only recruits and their families are classified, only about 50 per cent of the corpus material can be assigned a social group value. The material that has been classified is evenly distributed across the three social groups. This is shown in Figure 2.2, which gives the total number of words for each social class.
low
high
middle
Figure 2.2.Distribution of COLT text material in the various social classes
The classification of the individual recruits is shown in Table 2.1 below. 2.2.3 Ethnicity As is well known, London is an ethnically diverse city, with a great proportion of people from various ethnic minorities. Greater London is the part of Britain with the greatest concentration of ethnic minorities, according to the official statistics of the 1991 census (cf. the three volumes entitled Ethnicity in the 1991 Census). 44.6 per cent of Britain’s ethnic minority population live in London,
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Trends in Teenage Talk
but ‘only’ 12.2 per cent of Britain’s total population live there. Given this high proportion, we can assume that many of the COLT speakers have an ethnic minority background. In fact, the London boroughs represented in COLT figure widely on the lists of the largest district populations for various ethnic minority groups. For instance, the boroughs of Hackney and Brent are among the top dozen areas for all of the black groups (Black Caribbean, Black African, Black Other). The boroughs of Brent and Barnet are among the top dozen areas for the Indian group. Tower Hamlets, Camden and Hackney figure on the list for the Bangladeshi group, while Barnet, Camden and Brent figure on the list for the Chinese group.3 However, ethnic group membership was not specifically asked for in the personal data survey or the conversation logs, and consequently the available information about the ethnicity of the individual speakers is insufficient. Nevertheless, it has been possible to extract some information from two different sources. Firstly, the field worker has provided information regarding the ethnic background of several of the recruits (cf. Andersen 2001). Secondly, the conversations reveal the ethnicity of some of the speakers, as they contain explicit mention of ethnicity in the discourse: (20) There’s my mum. …My brother Ben he’s always trying a s= fix up the sitting room … and my brother Ben, he’s ver= he’s, he’s forgetful, he’s very forgetful and he always wants a clean up the sitting room. …This is Rolex. It’s a real Jamaican family. (134901: 220–244)
(21) Have you noticed that Ryan isn’t a white man by the way? Ryan is black, okay? I don’t know if that point has been put across yet, but Ryan is black. (132615: 23)
Race and ethnicity actually recur as topics in the conversations recorded by a group of black female speakers (cf. Sections 3.3.2 and 3.3.9). For instance, Susie and her female friends rank ‘the best looking boy starting from the top’ before specifying ‘the best looking white boy’, which suggests that whiteness is marked in the conversations between black adolescents.
3.In addition, Ratcliffe (1996) shows that Brent is the local district with the highest percentage (anywhere in Britain) of its population comprised of ethnic minority groups at 44.8 per cent, followed by Newham at 42.3 per cent (not included in COLT) and Tower Hamlets at 35.6 per cent. The corresponding percentages for Hackney and Camden are 33.6 and 17.8, respectively.
The speakers
All in all, this information enables us to classify speakers by ethnicity. They were grouped as either ‘White’ or ‘Ethnic minority’, a classification which is based on the ten main ethnic categories applied in the Census survey statistics (cf. Peach 1996). Unfortunately, this is a very crude classification and one which does not do justice to the ethnic diversity that exists in the London Metropolitan area. Nevertheless we apply this classification when describing the ethnic conditioning of the linguistic features that are investigated in the following chapters. As also seen from the survey below, 28 of the 30 recruits were classified, eleven of whom are from various ethnic minorities.
2.3 The recruits and the boroughs The information about the recruits that is directly retrievable from the corpus is summed up in the survey shown in Table 2.1.4 2.3.1 Hackney As can be seen from the table, four of the six Hackney recruits are from ethnic minorities, and with one exception, the recruits from this borough belong to the lowest socioeconomic group. In many ways, the Hackney conversations are among the most interesting from the point of conversational and formal linguistic features as well as the ethnographic characteristics of the participants. They include the contributions of some of the most conversation-productive participants in the COLT project, and many of the linguistic (e.g. non-standard) features that we will describe in the chapters that follow thrive in the environments of Hackney speakers. In her MA thesis, Berland (1997) gave a description of the school boroughs listed in Table 2.1 on the basis of information from sources such as the Internet edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica and official county and borough Internet homepages. According to this information, ‘the present standards and conditions of living in Hackney are not altogether favourable’ (Berland 1997: 14). It has been the first point of settlement for many London immigrants, and with its high unemployment rate and low average income level, Hackney is traditionally
4.As recruits 16, 20 and 32 failed to produce any recordings, they are not represented in the table.
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Table 2.1.Survey of the COLT recruits Recruit Ficticious GenderAge School borough Residential number name borough
Social Ethnicity group
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 17 18 19 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 33
2 3 3 3 3 3 – 3 3 2 3 2 1 2 1 2 2 1 1 2 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 1 1 1
Simon Susie Pieter Mandy Agathon Gwen Ronny Kenneth Wyatt Agathon Ion Mitch Chelsea Norah Leonard Callum Nathan William Ethan Tommy Robert Ryan Alphie Carola Mandy Dylan Jack Nicolas Kate Rebecca
M F M F M F M M M M M M F F M M M M M M M M M F F M M M F F
14 14 15 15 15 14 13 13 13 13 14 13 13 13 13 13 13 17 12 14 14 15 14 14 15 13 16 15 17 16
Hackney Hackney Hackney Hackney Hackney Hackney Tower Hamlets Tower Hamlets Tower Hamlets Tower Hamlets Tower Hamlets Tower Hamlets Camden Camden Camden Camden Camden Camden Camden Barnet Barnet Barnet Barnet Barnet Barnet Hertfordshire Hertfordshire Hertfordshire Hertfordshire Hertfordshire
Hackney Hackney Hackney Hackney Hackney Stoke Newington Tower Hamlets Bow Tower Hamlets Bow Bow Bow Westminster Brent Camden Camden Brent Camden Islington Barnet Southgate Barnet Barnet Hackney Enfield Islington Richmond Essex Hertfordshire North London
white ethnic minority ethnic minority white ethnic minority ethnic minority white white white ethnic minority white white ethnic minority white ethnic minority ethnic minority white white white ethnic minority – ethnic minority white white ethnic minority white white white white white
one of the more ‘deprived’ boroughs of London. However, strategies for considerable face-lifts are planned and being implemented. Due to its proximity to London’s financial centre, the City, combined with low estate prices, Hackney is assumed to be a major area for future investment and prosperity.
The speakers
2.3.2 Tower Hamlets While the Hackney recruits generally contributed considerable amounts of text, the contributions of the five recruits from Tower Hamlets, Ronny, Kenneth, Wyatt, Agathon, Ion and Mitch, is quantitatively insignificant. In addition, two of them, Kenneth and Wyatt, mainly recorded the speech of their parents and other adults. As a result, adult conversation accounts for about a third of the material from this borough, and this notable bias makes the texts much less reliable as a basis for a description of teenage language, of course. Therefore, Tower Hamlets stands out as the ‘odd borough’ in COLT, which is sometimes statistically reflected in tables on the distribution of innovative features, (cf. Andersen 2001, Chapters 4–5). Table 2.1 shows that, while the Hackney recruits are 14–15 years of age, the Tower Hamlets group consists of 13-year-olds, except for Ion who has turned 14. The recruits from this borough are all boys, and are all white, except for Agathon. As regards social class, three of them belong to group 3 (lowest), while two belong to group 2 (middle). Tower Hamlets, like Hackney, has high unemployment rates, and attempts at bringing prosperity to the area, through the large-scale redevelopment of the financial and industrial area known as the Docklands, have only to a limited extent helped the East End residents of Tower Hamlets. The Docklands project ‘raised hopes for a change of direction in the lives of many unemployed skilled workers in the borough’ (Berland 1997: 16), but proved disappointing to the local residents, since it was not targeting local unemployment, and ‘no specific goals were aimed at in terms of housing’ (ibid.). It should also be pointed out that the Cockney dialect is a prominent feature of this area (ibid: 15). 2.3.3 Camden Camden appears as the COLT-borough with the greatest ethnic and age heterogeneity. The seven recruits, two girls and five boys, range from 12 to 17 years of age, and represent such ethnic backgrounds as Afro-Caribbean, English, Indian or Pakistani, and one possibly Polish. In terms of social class, Camden ranges higher than the two boroughs discussed above, as the speakers are evenly distributed in classes 1 (high) and 2 (middle). Located ‘between the run-down east and the prosperous west side of London’ (Berland 1997: 13), Camden is also full of contrasts more generally. It includes up-market, expensive residential areas such as the villages of Hamp-
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Trends in Teenage Talk
stead and Highgate, and the less expensive, but hugely popular, market area in Camden Town. Its unemployment rate is generally lower than the less prosperous boroughs like Hackney and Tower Hamlets, and ‘demographic figures indicate that Camden is a favourable borough to reside in’ (ibid.). 2.3.4 Barnet The recruits from Barnet are more homogeneous, as all six belong to either class 1 or 2 and are 14 to15 years old. This group contains a mixture of boys and girls of different ethnicities, including speakers with Greek and probably Indian/ Pakistani backgrounds. Barnet is an outer London borough, and is predominantly a residential, and slightly up-market, area. ‘Fertility rates and mortality statistics indicate that Barnet is a “considerably healthier” place to live in than Tower Hamlets’ (Berland 1997: 13). Until relatively recently, it was almost entirely agricultural, but its farmland was gradually replaced by Victorian villas. 2.3.5 Hertfordshire The group of five Hertfordshire private school-goers, represented by two female and three male recruits, is markedly different from the other COLT-groups in several respects. First of all, this is the only borough that is not ethnically mixed in any way; all the speakers have an Anglo-Saxon background. Secondly, and importantly, the Hertfordshire speakers are generally older than the rest of the recruits, most of them being 16 to17 years of age. And finally, these speakers generally have a higher score in the socioeconomic score than the rest of the COLT recruits. Except for one recruit from class 2, they all belong to the highest class. According to the Hertfordshire County Council’s Internet home page, Hertfordshire is ‘one of the most prosperous parts of the country’ (cf. Berland 1997: 17). Although this area was also affected by the recession of the early 1990s, its unemployment rates are generally considerably lower than those of the other areas described above. There has been a substantial increase in the population in Hertfordshire, primarily due to increased business, especially within electronics, computers and telecommunications, making Hertfordshire a vital part of suburban London.
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Chapter 3
The conversations
So come on, talk to me! Tell me your dreams. Come on, don’t be shy, it’s just a microphone! Come on then, hit me with some conversation. Conversation would be nice. Susie, 15
What characterizes teenage conversations? Listening to the recordings, one realises they are as varied as the speakers themselves; yet there is something unmistakeably youthful in all of them. In this chapter we will give a brief glimpse into the colourful world of the COLT teenagers, as it is presented to us through the tape recordings. In many respects, listening to the recordings is like peeping through a key hole. Sometimes you only get snippets of conversation. Some recordings start and stop in the middle of a sentence, topic, or conversation, which means that contextualisation can be problematic. And of course, we do not have access to non-verbal language, which is important in the production and interpretation of talk. Still, it is amazing how much one can actually get out of just listening to the recordings and reading the transcriptions, which testifies to the enormous strength of this kind of linguistic data. The conversations can be subcategorised in a number of ways. In this chapter we will partly focus on participant framework and topic, partly on other aspects, such as number of participants, gender, age, and setting. There are of course many other ways of seeing the material, but the limited scope of this book forces us to select certain categories and leave others out. Thus, this chapter gives only a broad sketch of the material, presented as a largely qualitative description of the conversations. As regards participant frameworks, there are basically three types of conversation. The first and most important type is the interaction between teenagers and their peers, as the majority of the conversations have teenagers only as participants. The two other types involve mixed age groups: there is the school talk, mainly classroom interaction involving teenage students and one or more adult teachers, and we have the family talk, involving the teenagers and their parents, siblings or other relatives. Together these give a broad picture of
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the language of teenagers, showing how they talk in different situations and with different types of coparticipants. We will give examples from all three types of conversation, beginning with the first and most important type, the interaction between the recruits and their peers (Section 3.1). Then we will describe the school talk (Section 3.2) and finally the family interactions (Section 3.3).
3.1 The teenagers and their peers 3.1.1
Introduction
It is not easy to quantify the number of participants for each conversation, as many speakers come and go during the recordings. The majority of the conversations are between two or three speakers, but there are all kinds of constellations. We even have monologues: some recruits recorded themselves speaking on their own to the microphone, and these recordings sometimes go on at length. In (22), Callum is on his own, getting ready to go to bed and describing in detail everything he is doing (the numbers in parentheses indicate pauses in seconds): (22) Brushing my teeth now …(60). Drying my hands with the towel there …(20). Getting undressed, good job you can’t see me. …(17) ·nvÒwhistling·/nvÒ(10). ·nvÒhumming·/nvÒ(4) ·nvÒwhistling·/nvÒ(2). Oh shit. Shitty, gone and ripped my thing. Gone and ripped my shirt. Oh shitty shit shit. Big rip right underneath the armpit bit. ·unclearÒ …(16) Taking off the stereo. (137802: 1)
Some conversations have many speakers involved, and these can be a challenge to listen to. They are often intense and loud, with plenty of overlapping speech, laughther and background noise. In addition, when there are more than three speakers they tend to split into two or more groups talking simultaneously, and sorting out who is who can be a challenge. In the most extreme cases, the number of participants in a single conversation varies between two and ten. In addition, the speaker who carried the walkman did not always sit still, but moved around while recording, walking, running, playing or fighting. The word ‘dynamic’ gets a new dimension in the COLT material! Agewise, teenagers are a heterogeneous group, and the conversations between the youngest speakers sometimes differ dramatically from those of the oldest.
The conversations
While the oldest ones may discuss taking the driving licence and career plans, the 13 year-olds can have lengthy conversations about playing with water bombs or building snowmen around rocks (23): (23) The best best snowman that I’ve ever made was I got this massive rock yeah and I put all snow round it. And these guys came up and go oi you’re not allowed to build that there. And I said well up yours mate cos I am. And he went to kick it and he just went crack. (141405: 324–329)
One thing the youngest and oldest teenagers have in common is their concern about friendships, relations and social networks. In fact, most of the conversations, regardless of the speakers’ age, revolve around this. There is, of course, nothing exclusively youth-like in being concerned about friendship, but the intensity and amount of time they spend talking about it reflects that adolescence is a period in life where identity building is largely formed in peer group interaction. Who you are is largely a matter of who you hang out with. In 3.1.2, we will give some examples of social networking in COLT. 3.1.2 Social networking The most extreme cases of network talk is found among the youngest middleclass girls, especially Chelsea and Norah, both 13 years old. Listening to the conversations recorded by these two recruits, one visualises an inseparable blob of girls sticking their heads together, spending most of their time caring and worrying about what the other members of the blob think and feel. Considering their age, one surely is impressed by their negotiating skills. In (24), for instance, we see how thorougly Norah and Chelsea consult each other before making a decision: (24) Norah: Chelsea: Norah: Chelsea: Norah: Chelsea: Norah: Chelsea: Norah: Chelsea:
well now, are we gonna go to Pulsar or not? up to you … should we or not? eh? what? should we? up to you really do you want to? I don’t mind it’s best to do it at weekend
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Norah: Chelsea: Norah: Chelsea: Norah:
yeah, more time innit? yeah, do it on the bank holiday yeah if, if, it’s open, should we? okay
(136601: 764–779)
One important aspect of being a blob member is the sharing of secrets. There exists a complex network of who-knows-what and strict rules for who-can-tellwhat-to-whom, even within the peer group. As Esmee says, ‘I know something that you don’t know like, I know that you don’t know that I know’. Once one of the girls is away, the others are quick to talk about her. Note the perfect timing in Esmee’s turn in (25). After saying goodbye to Carita, Esmee immediately starts to talk about her: (25) Carita: Norah: Esmee: Norah: Esmee:
bye [see ya] [bye]… she fancies Henry yeah yeah …
(136601: 274–278)
The girls are aware that they are being two-faced. Being two-faced is, in fact, a topic that appears in all the middle-class girls’ conversations, not just the youngest ones’. According to Carola, for instance, Nisha is two-faced because one minute she says Semantha is a bitch and the next minute she wants to sit next to her. Still, they acknowledge the need for being two-faced. Besides, as Rebecca expresses it, it is ‘only human’, and in fact it is a necessary part of the typically indirect communicative style characteristic of the middle-class girls. Their indirect style affects the way they deal with problems, both externally and internally within the peer group (cf. Chapter 8 on conflict talk). Especially the youngest girls tend to go into a state of ‘not talking to each other’ if they have a serious problem, rather than confronting each other directly. The most common way to get out of this state is by means of a third party, who acts as a mediator, negotiating ‘peace talks’. The older middle-class girls more often confront each other and talk about their problems, altough they do it in a softened and mitigated way. The working-class girls tend to deal with problems somewhat differently, as is discussed in Chapter 8. The boys seem equally concerned about social networking, although they spend less time building networks of secrecy. Tommy, for instance, is extremely
The conversations
social in a typical teenage kind of way: parents and siblings are a ‘pain in the arse’ and friends are all that matters. In fact, friends matter so much that every conversation Tommy has recorded revolves around his friends and what they are going to do: should they stay home, play football, go to a party, go to a disco, or what? Especially the question ‘who’s gonna be there?’ is of vital importance, and Tommy and friends spend a lot of time discussing it: (26) Yeah. And she goes, oh I might come, I don’t know where it is so I told her where it was, and she goes, erm, are you going? and I go yeah. And she said I’ll probably come, and she goes is Jonny going? and I go, yeah, and then she goes, does erm your friend, does Jonny really like, my friend, I go I dunno, but, he was by himself so I set him up, and she goes erm erm, if he doesn’t like her then I’ll tell my friend not to come, alright? and I’ll pass subtle hints about it and I go, I’m just passing a subtle hint right. (139611: 19–21)
The negative side of this concern is, of course, the fear that the right people will not show up at the party. If it is so important that they be there, it means a whole party can get ruined if they are not! The ‘right’ people is also a frequent topic in the conversations between Rebecca and her girlfriends. They know that a girl’s success has to do with being popular among the boys, being beautiful, and generally well-liked by the ‘right’ people, i.e. those who score high on the popularity scale. Being popular is a vulnerable state, which requires skills in knowing who to talk to and not talk to, as well as what to do and not to do. Not all the girls posess these skills, and the consequences can be brutal. Hannah, for instance, is a newcomer to Hertfordshire, and has problems being accepted socially. She is insecure, gullible, and not very popular among the boys. In (27), Hannah is telling Rebecca how the boys had been teasing her and commenting on her clothes the night before. She does not understand why they always pick on her: (27) Hannah: Rebecca: Hannah: Rebecca: Hannah: Rebecca:
But why me? It’s probably cos I walked in and they called me over, you know Why you? Because you’re so gullible, I don’t know why you [No I was the only girl there, I was the only girl there.] [It’s because, it’s because, no it’s because] of what you did last week. No well I said to them [I mean] [You’re just] a laughing stock at the
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Hannah: Rebecca: Rebecca:
moment. Who me? Yeah (…) you have this, name you know for being a joke.
(142703: 78–145)
While Hannah tries to talk her way through her problems and into being accepted socially, others prefer to deal with such matters using their bare hands. To Robert and Max, for instance, social networking can be a matter of winning a fight over a girl: (28) Robert: Look, Ollie is the one that started it all in the first, he let that happen, but if anything, if Ollie thinks we do him then Gareth will probably (…) then we’ll fight. Max: [Yeah.] Robert: [And] if either of them call people in, look Paul Max: Ollie’s bringing both of his mates in. Ollie said, yeah, he’s gonna bring some mates in right? Robert: Yeah. Max: But he’s not gonna start anything unless they start something. (…) Max: And like, that, wha=, the thing is, Ollie’s the one that’ll bring his mates in cos he can’t face it. (…) Robert: Right, Ollie will get beaten up, right? (…) Robert: Look, then you’ll get beaten up, right? And then Ollie will be stay best friends (139801: 19–39)
Disputes over girls are serious, and testimony to the overwhelming importance of romance, which is the topic of our next section. 3.1.3 Romance 3.1.3.1First love The youngest speakers mainly interact in single-sex peer groups. They show little interest in, and are sometimes even embarrassed about, the opposite sex. Among the older ones, we see a different attitude, as they begin to explore the excitement of mixed-sex interaction. At first, they mix play and romance, and
The conversations
we have plenty of examples of playful flirting in larger mixed-sex crowds, even in front of the teacher in the classroom: (29) Set:
Hear me come come come come come come I give you a nice kiss. Gwen: Move, move Set I don’t want no kiss from you. Set: ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ I give [you, I give you a nice kiss] Gwen: [Move, move] Set, move Set: ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Gwen: Get off ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ (134803: 297–302)
Some of the young girls use their negotiating expertise (cf. 3.1.2) in their first romantic relationships. In (30), Joanna negotiates between Paul and Kim who have just split up. She calls Kim and reports what Paul has said to her, then calls Paul to report from the conversation with Kim, calls Kim back again and finally calls Paul. Here are two brief excerpts from the telephone conversations (first with Kim, then Paul): (30) he goes to erm, he reckons, that you’re, like you know drifting apart and everything, and that you’re going off him and everything, and he goes, and like, you know it’s just. He reckons like he wants to be friends but he just doesn’t want to go out with you any more. To put it mildly ·nvÒgiggle·/nvÒ … Yeah, what d’y= what do you want me to say. Fine or make a big kerfuffle and say you little … alright then, well see what happens okay? Shall I ring him now, do you want me to ring him back? …Alright, see you see you, bye.·/telÒ (…) Hello, hello Paul, hi it’s Jo. Yeah, I just rang her alright? and she just goes oh I can’t force him to do anything. Yeah, so what do you want me to say? …I said what do you want me to say? …(8) Alright, do you still wanna be friends? I think she still wants to be friends. Alright any other do you want me to just, do you want me to just to get her to call you? …Alright, alright then, I’ll see what happens okay. Alright see you later. Right, bye.·/telÒ (140606: 4–5)
Among some of the older teenagers, we find a somewhat different and more mature interaction between boys and girls. This is especially true for the established couples, who seem much more relaxed. Jack, for instance, has recorded several conversations between himself and his girlfriend, Nicole, in which there is none of the embarassment we see among the youngest ones. Jack and Nicole discuss everything from football to menstruation:
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(31) Nicole: Everyone says I’m the most frank person when it comes to things like that. Most people are still really secretive about it. But I just say, I’d be talking to someone and say, has anyone got Tampax super please. ·laughingÒThat’s the orange one. And everyone goes, my god what are you?·/Ò ·reading from magazine and commentingÒ Wearing a bra, no loo paper now that’s a big one, no loo paper. Spending a fortune on taxis because the streets aren’t safe at night yeah I do that anyway. Doing up the oh I don’t wear bodies cos they’re so uncomfortable. I mean they’re absolutely ·unclearÒ. Communal changing rooms, that’s a really bad one.·/Ò [Communal changing rooms.] Jack: [What’s wrong with communal] changing rooms? Nicole: Those are awful. Especially when the one next to you has got like forty four inch legs, and size B bra, you’re standing there and going, okay (141703: 5–7)
Much of teenage romance is surrounded by mystery. The girls wonder what the boys think about them and vice versa. Thanks to COLT, we are now able to reveal some of it, which we will do in the next two sections. 3.1.3.2Girls about boys Some of the younger girls are charmingly romantic, and they enjoy talking and daydreaming about old-fashioned love. Chelsea thinks it would be nice to have ‘a handsome prince come riding past and sweep you off your feet’. The trouble is that the boys their age are so hopelessly unromantic. Besides, they cannot stay true. As Esmee says: ‘I hate boys which dump you, you could do nothing, you’re the fool’. Also, boys have this annoying habit of playing cool when there are other boys around: (32) Esmee: Norah: Esmee: Norah: Esmee: Norah: Esmee: Norah:
by themself it’s ·unclearÒ okay, they’re are okay, I mean, right but ·nvÒsniff·/nvÒ with their friends [they’ve gotta show off] [in school,] yeah everything, so … they’re so stupid can’t be, [you know] [they’re just] be cool and everything yeah
(136601: 732–739)
The conversations
The girls know that the boys are playing a game, and they know that they have to play their part, too. For the girls, the rules of the game are largely learnt during the lengthy and detailed conversations they have about boys and romance. In (33), Norah is telling her girlfriends how she started dating Lionel: (33) Esmee: oh, oi, the thing is okay, did it, did erm, did, Lionel just suddenly like ask you out or did [someone got you together?] Norah: [no, it wa=, it wa=, it was] after the party, after the Christmas party and everybody was going oh Esmee: oh yeah, yeah Norah: so, so then Anita goes, no I go, tell him to put it in a letter then yeah, and he was gonna put it in a letter and then he changed his mind and he said he was gonna ask me after school, but then he didn’t ask me after school and Kate gave him my phone number and then he phoned me (136601: 755–758)
One way to avoid the fear of having a boy say no to a girl’s face is, of course, to get someone to ask for her: (34) Esmee: you must ask him if he fancies me and love him and ask him why he says he’d phone me that often, ask him that, you must say, right, yeah, but don’t tell him that I told you to ask him, yeah Norah: I’ll just say do you phone her? [yeah] Esmee: [okay] (136601: 639–641)
The older girls are more experienced in the boy/girl game, and express a more realistic — sometimes even cynical — attitude towards it. Michele says that her whole school ‘revolves around snogging people, going out with people, shagging people.’ She continues: ‘It’s just a nightmare’, and Kate calls it ‘a real system’. This does not mean that the girls feel they are victims of the system. On the contrary, they can be quite cynical and competitive when it comes to boys: (35) Wendy: Michele: Wendy: Michele:
Wake up girl, who are you going to [snog? Who are you going to snog on Saturday?] [Tired. Who is ·shoutingÒ I don’t know·/Ò.] Snog Phil. No I’ve done him already ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ
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Wendy: Michele: Wendy: Michele: Wendy: Michele:
So? done it, been there, got the T-shirt. Got the video, got the fliers ·nvÒyawn·/nvÒ Mm. I don’t know. ·yawningÒOh ·unclearÒ·/Ò go for Phil. I’ll probably end up snogging with him at my party. ·nvÒsniff·/nvÒ Les thinks I’m going to start snogging at my party I said yeah probably.
(142307: 513–522)
This only confirms what boys have suspected all along: girls can’t be trusted! And now, what do the boys say about the girls? 3.1.3.3Boys about girls Some of the youngest boys have not yet overcome their embarrasment for the opposite sex. While Chelsea and her friends dream about a prince on a white horse, Callum would rather be dead than be accused of having Sandra as his girlfriend: (36) Don’t take any notice of this, this is my friend Marc here, he’s speaking a lot of crap at the moment. I do not have a girlfriend called Sandra, and if I did, I think I’d kill myself (137701: 223–226)
Craig and Antony, both 13, also find girls annoying, especially the whining ones on the morning train: (37) Craig: Antony: Craig:
Thousands! They crowd all the seats yeah and you can hear them ·nvÒwhining·/nvÒ ·shoutingÒWe know!·/Ò and they’re like so loud and high-pitched and then when they laugh
(139201: 89–91)
Some of the youngest boys try out the stereotypical role of the ‘brute male’ in their conversations about girls. In (38), Wyatt and Joe, both 13 years old, talk about a girl called Fay: (38) Wyatt: Joe: Wyatt: Joe:
Do you think she’s a horny girl? Yeah. Would you fuck her? Yeah.
(135806: 64–67)
The conversations
Even the older boys rarely talk seriously among themselves about girls they like. Bringing their competitive skills into their talk about romance, they mainly tease each other in the playful dispute manner: ‘You fancy her, don’t you? -No, I don’t! -Yes, you do!’ and so on (cf. Chapter 8). This confirms, of course, what many girls suspect about boys. Another suspicion confirmed is that ugly girls are talked about negatively: ‘She’s short, fat, stonky, round, covered in acne’ is one description. But on the other hand — and this would perhaps surprise Rebecca — too much beauty can also be a problem. There are some new girls at Jack’s school, and the boys are glad they do not look like super models: (39) Elliot: Jack: Elliot: Jack: Elliot:
And anyway if they were super models who would be able to go out with one, or talk to I mean they, so [sad.] [I] know, I’d rather have someone who was Reasonable Reasonably good looking and a good laugh, Yeah, cos then you know you’ve got a chance
(141605: 110–114)
Although much of the boys’ talk about girls is playful or competitive, there are several examples of the lengthy, serious gossip rounds of the same kind as we find in the all-girls’ talk. In (40), Alphie and Lionel discuss the eternally interesting question ‘who fancies whom’: (40) Lionel: Alphie: Lionel: Alphie: Lionel: Alphie: Lionel: Alphie: Lionel: Alphie: Lionel:
·whisperingÒPierre fancies Chloe ·/Ò ·laughingÒDoes he?·/Ò Dunno. She does, does she? No. God! Does sh= does she? Yeah. Chloe fancies Pierre. But does Pierre fancy I don’t know.
(140402: 160–170)
Example (41) is a rare case where a boy who is not ashamed to openly admit that he likes a girl, even if the other boys tease him:
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(41) Robert: Really, I, I fancy Linda cos she’s a very nice girl. Gareth: Louder. I can’t hear you. Robert: Ah? I fancy Linda cos she’s a very nice girl and I know you’re recording this but I don’t care if she hears it because she’s got lovely eyes. (139809: 195–197)
Compared to what many of the other boys say about girls, this is a very innocent example. In the next section, we will leave innocence altogether and hear what the teenagers have to say about one of their favourite topics: sex. 3.1.4 Sex talk Not surprisingly, the teenagers talk a lot about sex, that is heterosexual sex. At one time a speaker says ‘what’s wrong with being gay?’, but for the rest, homosexuality is either ignored, openly and strongly rejected, or used in accusations (‘you’re gay!’). Many of the teenagers are impressively informed about the sexual experience (or lack of such) of their friends. They talk about who has had sex, who is still a virgin, who wants to have sex, who cannot get it, and so on. Even the youngest ones are informed: Dylan (13) and his friends talk about ‘who has been laid’ in school, about porno films and topless beaches. At a very early age they learn how to talk about sex in a way that has no correspondence whatsoever to their own sexual experience. Some of them learn this by practicing in ritual insults, such as Wyatt and his friends (cf. Chapter 8): (42) Vic:
Your Mum’s got so many hairs on her fanny Tarzan don’t know which one to swing on! Wyatt: I’ve he=, I’ve heard that one before, but like … it’s just like this one innit? Your Mum’s fucking fanny … is so wrinkly … the crabs … have got walking sticks. (…) Wyatt: ·shoutingÒGo tell your Mum·/Ò to to=, stop changing her lipstick cos she’s making my cock look like a rainbow. Will: Yeah, tell your Mum to give me … the twelve pence, er, er the two P cos erm … it wasn’t, it wasn’t worth last night. Wyatt: Tell your Mum to give my money back (135805: 126–161)
In (43), Pieter, who is only ten years old, admits that perhaps they are too young for sex:
The conversations
(43) Joe: Pieter: Joe: Pieter:
You gonna fuck her? Yeah. I don’t think so somehow. Nah. It’s against the ru= I me= I mean I’m too young to fuck ain’t [I]? Wyatt: [You’re] damn right. (135806: 82–86)
Others have a more indirect vocabulary to talk about sex. In (44), Brett talks about how Linda would go out with Barry, but when Danielle suggests go with, there is a need for clarification: (44) Brett: Danielle: Brett: Danielle:
Go out with him. Go with him. Go with him? Yeah. Not all the way.
(135304: 31–34)
There are many references to the Problem Page in some youth magazine, which the teenagers read to satisfy their curiosity about sex. The Problem Page is a column where some ‘expert’ answers readers’ letters and takes up issues such as one-night-stands and orgasms, as well as more taboo subjects such as rape, unwanted pregnancy, and animal sex. For the teenagers, whose curiosity about sex is larger than their own sexual experience, the Problem Page seems to fill a gap. Although many of the girls are open about sex and some of them apparently are sexually active, it is clear that especially the middle-class girls are subject to double standards and that they have their reputation to be concerned about. Especially in the boarding school girls’ conversations, reputation is a recurring topic. They want to be popular among the boys, including being sexually attractive, but they are concerned about their sexual moral. One way to handle this is to be careful to dress ‘decently’, so that they will not be thought of as ‘slutty’ or ‘provocative’. The Hackney girls never express such concerns. In fact, some of the Hackney girls openly claim that they do not care what people think. And from the conversations between Gwen and her sisters, it is clear that their Afro-carribean style of dress is very sensual and might be concidered provocative or indecent by main-stream middle-class standards. It seems that we are dealing with differences in style, because the boarding school girls do not seem to be more innocent than their more sexy-looking Hackney sisters. 16-year-old Rebecca and her friends joke about how they could earn money from the younger students by charging them for their first kiss, and in (45), Rebecca tells
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about how she ‘snogged someone for his hat’. In a joking manner, they discuss moral standards about sex: (45) Rebecca:
Mary: Rebecca: Mary: Rebecca: Mary: Rebecca: Tess: Mary: Tess: Rebecca: Tess:
it wasn’t good because erm I didn’t love him, and right so so if I kissed him and met him the next day would I, would I snog, would would he, wo= he’d give me the hat so I said yeah sure you know whatever, so he goes okay, and he like prepared himself and goes no I can’t do it in here ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ ·laughingÒand so I had to go outside with him, snog him, got his hat and pissed off, never saw him again·/Ò. I got six cigarettes from one ·unclearÒ Really? It’s no it’s g= it’s quite good you know, little weapon isn’t it? Well weapon, you can use it to your advantage. ·laughingÒ·unclearÒ it is actually·/Ò. It is isn’t it? Yeah being paid to ·laughingÒdo it·/Ò. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ You slapper! What did you sleep for? A cap! Right well I’m going to [·unclearÒ] [Yeah] your, here’s, here’s your Christmas present ·laughingÒI was on the streets for that·/Ò. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Can you imagine your mum
(142704: 131–142)
Generally, the Hackney girls are more explicit in their talk about sex, as in the following discussion about oral sex and masturbation: (46) Sharon: What, oral sex? Allie: I wouldn’t mind provided I had flavoured condoms ·unclearÒ ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Susie: I don’t think there’s nothing the matter with oral sex [as long as,] Allie: [There is nothing the matter it’s just another form of sex] Susie: as long as he’s got a [clean penis!] Allie: [It’s, it’s] safer! It’s sa= safer sex, you know. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Susie: No, I don’t think there’s anything the [matter with oral sex.] Kate: [Would you ever toss
The conversations
Susie: Allie: Susie:
someone off]. Toss your boyfriend off? What’s that? Wanking for him. I’ve already done that ·laughingÒ·unclearÒ·/Ò
(132913: 1–11)
Some of the older boys boast about their sexual experience. Flirting with Judy, William ‘shows off’ by letting her know he is sexually active and experienced in a humorous and self-mocking way: (47) William: Judy: William: (…) Judy: William: Judy: William:
Incidentally don’t ever try Femidom, it’s like shagging a crisp packet or a freezer bag. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ A serious waste of time. Have you ever tried one of those Femidoms? They’re useless. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ It’s like shagging a fucking crisp bag I’m telling you. And they rustle. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ
(139001: 73–81)
3.1.5 Partying and drinking Cliff, Elliot and Pierre, all 16 years old, talk about how boys are expected to take the initiative with girls and not the other way around. The pressure to take the initiative is not always easy to deal with, but partying and drinking helps: (48) Cliff:
I don’t think I will I’m going to see if I can pull a woman without erm getting pissed. Elliot: You can’t, you know that, you have to get pissed. Pierre: You do. Thing is though [it’s much] Elliot: [·unclearÒ] Cliff: it’s much better though if you go in a group anyway. Elliot: Yeah I know. (141902: 117–122)
One important thing about parties is all the gossip you get afterwards: who was there, who was drunk (and how drunk), who got off with whom, and who started fighting with whom and so on:
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(49) No I know this other geezer yeah, right, I was dancing with Kate yeah, and, you know in the thing, yeah, and er, he can’t, he can’t take it and he sort of, took off me yeah, and I was dancing round with her yeah, and like, and like afterward he goes oh sod that yeah, erm … like tal=, talking and everything yeah? (139613: 22)
The teenagers also talk about the negative sides of drinking, and they often discuss how sick they have been after drinking. Kate tells about how she got ‘so fucked’ (i.e. drunk) in a pub drinking cider, Tequila shots and G&T, that she had to go ‘crawling back’ to her house. Jack and Elliot, both 16, talk about what they call ‘sad’ drinking habits: secret drinking at the boarding school. First they have to smuggle the alcohol onto the school ground, then find a secret place to hide it, then find a safe place to drink it and invent some cover-up plans in case a teacher appears. Of course, they have to drink spirits, because beer takes ‘ages to drink’, and after all, they have to get drunk in a hurry before they are caught drinking by the teachers: (50) Jack:
Elliot: Jack:
I mean it’s sad drinking innit? It’s fucking slot, I mean you have to drink it so quickly you don’t even enjoy it, you feel like yukky, you can’t, you’re drinking and you’re shitting yourself all the time you’re always looking at the door, you can’t like No you’ve got ·unclearÒ like this. Well where do you drink it? You think of places and you, you spend about, you spend about half, you spend about half the time before you get it working out where to do it and then you think oh no can’t do that and then you
(141904: 4–6)
Mandy, who is 15, and her friends are the ones who talk the most about partying, drinking and smoking. They talk about rave parties, discuss cigarette brands, exchange experiences about getting drunk, how much alcohol they can take, how drunk they have been and how sick they have been after drinking. Mandy seems to have learnt her drinking habits at home: (51) Holly: The secret of drinking is just to know when to stop, you know you’ve just got Mandy: I know. Holly: gotta recognize when you get to a certain stage that like if you drink any more you’re gonna be ill.
The conversations
Mandy: Yeah I know but I mean like my mum was saying that you know … sometimes you’re just too pissed to stop and you just com= carry on and stuff. (133401:107–110)
3.1.6 The body There is a noticeable difference between how the boys and girls talk about the body. Only the girls have lengthy and detailed conversations about how they work on their body to look nice. Judging by their talk, physical beauty seems as important to the girls as being well-liked for one’s personality or behaviour. Their concern about being beautiful is of course closely tied to the traditional roles of the ‘male onlooker’ and the ‘female being looked at’. Rebecca’s knowing that she is constantly ‘in the spotlights’ to be judged for her looks causes a paranoid anxiety, as she fears the boys may think she is too fat, and she dreads to think ‘what gets said in the rugby changing rooms’. As she says, the popular boys will only talk to you ‘if they think you’re good looking’ (as we saw in Section 3.1.3.3, however, this is not entirely true!). Being good looking implies being beautiful and slim, and for many of the girls, this means they have to work on their body. And so they discuss dieting, working out, clothes, hair styles, makeup, and even plastic surgery. Norah, who is 13, her sister Emily and their mother talk about weight, and they even count calories and weigh their food before eating. Chelsea,13, and Rebecca, 16, have both recorded conversations where they talk at length with their friends about such things as which of the girls they know is beautiful, thin and tall enough to become a model. Carola, 14, has recorded a long sequence where she talks with her friends about shaving legs. They discuss in detail every possible aspect and problem concerning the shaving process: what razor blades to use, the problem about cutting and bleeding, bumpy legs, and so on. It is quite impressive to see how the girls (especially the middle-class girls) balance their wish to be acknowledged as beautiful by the others (‘You’re so pretty!’) and the expected modesty of self-deprecation (‘No, I’m not!’). In one of Chelsea’s recordings, the girls encourage Yasmin to enter the model competition. Once Yasmin has left, however, they admit that they only said it to flatter her. Note how they go on to flatter each other just as they did with Yasmin when she was present: (52) Megan: Chelsea:
I do you think Yasmin stands a chance I don’t know there’s millions [come on]
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Megan: Chelsea: Megan: Chelsea: Megan: Chelsea: Sophie: Chelsea: Megan: Chelsea: Megan: Sophie: Chelsea: Sophie: Chelsea: Sophie: Chelsea: Sophie: Chelsea: Sophie: Chelsea: Megan: Chelsea: Sophie: Chelsea: Megan: Sophie: Megan:
[I don’t] think so neither do I don’t say it ·unclearÒ … but I don’t think so because erm, the modelling agency, [she she, she’s, she’s] pretty yeah [I me= when when okay the] but there are beautiful people that will enter that yeah but [I don’t know] [come on] erm, when she asks this, does she stand a chance I’m gonna say yes she does, yeah [of course] [stand] a chance, but erm, I don’t think she does because erm erm, she just she’s she needs a bit more meat on her face, ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ she’s so, [puny] [·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ] ·laughingÒpuny·/Ò ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ you could do it if I was [taller, yeah] [a bit, a bit taller] yeah, cos all you you got the right body yeah erm, you’re pretty enough, and it’s like, taller … I don’t know about it all actually no, well Sophie, long hair yeah, but, perhaps she’s tall enough yeah … you could have done it I’d, no way you could have seriously, because they want, they don’t want, models that erm, they don’t want models that er erm, have got
(136411: 1–31)
Other girls talk less about such topics. Susie hardly ever talks about appearances, nor does Kate. In fact, others talk more about Kate’s looks than she does herself — from Rebecca we get to know that Kate’s nickname is ‘Big Cat’ (she is big-breasted). Apparently, Kate is rather plump, but she says she would never
The conversations
stop eating, and refuses to go to step classes (‘I’d rather be unfit’). She seems very self-confident and talks back to boys when they comment on her looks. In (53), she tells how the boys dared her to do a striptease for them: (53) then I said oh by the way I’m not erm I’m not doing house swimming this year, I’m not going to give you the, the pleasure (142307: 358)
The boys talk about the body in a different way. As the girls, they are concerned about popularity, but there is one big difference in how to get there — the boys are not as much in the spotlight for their looks as the girls, and this is reflected in how they deal with issues of appearance. They are less detailed and technical, and mainly limit themselves to talking about clothes. Tommy and Kieran, for instance, briefly talk about the cool new clothes they have bought and whether they should wear them at the next party. Agathon briefly mentions that he got ‘a wicked pair of ragamuffin trousers’ from a friend who just came back from Jamaica. Nathan and Mitch talk about some of the practical sides of shoes: Mitch likes Dr. Martin’s boots, ‘cos they’re hard, that’s the only reason why I like them so if you’re having a fight you can kick better’. In fact, the boys have recorded only one rather long ‘body conversation’, which takes place between 16-year-old Jack and his friends. They talk about weight, however, the focus is not ‘looking good’, but health — people with a high metabolic rate are less prone to get diseases than others: (54) Jack: Les: Jack: Russel: Elliot: Russel: Les: Jack: Elliot: Les: Jack: Elliot: Jack: Les: Elliot: Les:
Pe= people who don’t get fat when they eat, [loads] [That’s me] yeah. have got a higher metabolic rate. I don’t eat when I’m fat, [I eat absolutely] [I don’t] loads. [You don’t eat when you’re fat?] [Yeah but you ha= you haven’t got the disease yet.] [my brother diets but] [I haven’t got the disease] but I wanna go in the san. ·laughingÒYeah·/Ò. my brother diets and he [·nvÒcough·/nvÒ] [I don’t, I don’t, I don’t] I do get fat when I eat a lot. You can’t exactly say ·nameÒ [gets fat.] [I don’t have a bit a,] yeah [I’d
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only go to the] Elliot:
[And he doesn’t eat] much really does he?
(141901: 318–334)
The difference between girls and boys when it comes to how and how much they talk about the body parallels the way boys and girls talk about computers, except that in computer talk the roles are switched (cf. 3.1.7.4.) 3.1.7 Pastimes and hobbies 3.1.7.1Pop culture One of the most common conversation topics is pop culture. Pop culture is used as a common point of reference, as something the teenagers share. They have seen the same films and bought the same records and clothes. But pop culture is also used to draw a line between groups of people, between those who like the same films and songs and those who do not. The material provides us with a now historical glimpse into the pop culture of the 1990s. 3.1.7.2Cinema and TV Many of the teenagers talk about films or TV programmes at length. Susie says she always talks about ‘telly or Madonna’, and that she has recorded conversations about the film Thelma and Louise ‘about fifteen million times’ (which is, in fact, not far from the truth!). Most of the teenagers talk in detail about films they have seen, evaluating actors’ performances, film music, and special effects. They are especially fond of talking about films they have all seen, creating a sense of mutuality and shared interests. They comment on or argue about each other’s version of the narration, share their opinions on the film, compare the film with other films, etc. They talk in the same way about TV programs and series, soap operas and cartoons. Although more graded evaluations do occur, the teenagers’ evaluations tend to be quite categorical: a film is either ‘totally crap’ or ‘fucking brilliant’. Such evaluations usually deal with the film as a whole, and there is less focus on individual parts such as actors’ performances, special effects and music. Some of the comments we do have on actors focus both on how they act (Sharon Stone is a ‘shit actress’) as well as how they look (Jodie Foster is ‘ugly’ and Geena Davis is ‘pretty’).
The conversations
3.1.7.3Music The majority of the teenagers seem to prefer main-stream pop music, and they talk about singers such as Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Madonna, Duran Duran, and Randy Crawford, and groups like the Bangles, ABBA, and Take That. Many of them like to sing, and some record themselves singing into the microphone: (55) Carola: Shall I sing it? Shall I sing with you? Anne: One two three four. ·singingÒDum-do-be-do-dum·laughingÒdum·/singingÒ·/Ò Carola: Come on. many: ·singingÒcumma-cumma-cumma-dum-do-be-do-dum- dumcumma-cumma-dum-do-be-do-dum- dum-braking-up-ishard-to-do. Don’t take your love.·/Ò (140809: 95–97)
Some like more specific styles, such as Agathon, who likes raga music. He talks about a friend who just came back from Jamaica bringing him some Shabba Ranks records with ‘wicked raga music’: (56) Mamady:
Joshua: Agathon: Joshua : Agathon: Joshua: Mamady:
·mimickingÒDon’t mess with the best, till you passed your test, cos if you pass your test, you can mess with the best oooh!·/Ò ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Wicked rap. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ. Go on, could you rap? No. No you can’t. Simple as that. I am a rapper, wicked wicked rapper. I am a wicked rap=, wicked wicked rapper. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ You can’t test this. I am a wicked wicked ·nvÒsinging·/nvÒ
(134602: 39–45)
As with the films, the teenagers use taste in music as a means of identification, and to differentiate between different types of people. Mandy plays in a heavy metal band called the Sex Vikings, and she is not very fond of raga music. Susie adores Madonna, but is fed up with the boy band Take That. Her friend Sharon, on the other hand, is fed up with Madonnna, but dreams about Take That, and the two girls have some loud and playful ‘fights’ about their favourite pop idols (cf. 8.3.1). Some think that rap songs with explicitly sexual or violent lyrics are disgusting, while others like them. Ethan, 12, for instance, talks about how he
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prefers to listen to songs with ‘parental advisory explicit lyrics’, and Callum, 13, even sings them himself: (57) ·nvÒgiggle·/nvÒ You get ketchup, you get blast up, you get ketchup you get blast up, oh oh …(2) Blanks and spanks you get blank and then you get spank. (137901: 21)
The distance is huge between Ethan’s rapping on the one hand and Rebecca’s flute playing on the other. What stands out as most ‘different’, in terms of music, is nevertheless Charlie’s piano lessons. Charlie, who is 15, has recorded himself giving piano lessons to a 13-year-old boy, Jordan. He does not seem to know Jordan very well, so apparently it is ‘real’ piano lessons and not just helping a friend. Charlie is very mature, patient, and pedagogical in his teaching, although extremely focussed on the mathematics of music: (58) Charlie: remember how it was in the first place, so if you cut four in half, remember four Jordan: Yeah. Charlie: and add half of four. Jordan: Oh. so that makes six. Charlie: yeah. Jordan: Alright. Yeah. Charlie: Do it to eight. Jordan: Right eight. Right you cut it in four, so that’s four, but you remember the eight, so you add the other four Charlie: Mhm. Jordan: which is twelve. Charlie: Good. You got it now? Jordan: Yeah. Charlie: Yeah? You sure? Right, so, how many in that bar? Jordan: Er, three. Charlie: Good. (140201: 183–197)
3.1.7.4Computers Computers are a favourite topic among some of the boys, who talk at length about all the pros and cons and technical details of every single computer and computer program they know. All of Ion’s recordings are computer talk: Ion and two boys, 12–14 years old, are sitting in front of the computer playing games. In (59), Agathon, Salim and Keith are in the middle of a computer discussion:
The conversations
(59) Salim: That’s why ·unclearÒ stupid, it’s a good computer, like, the stuff that’s in this is very expensive but ·unclearÒ start coming out, Agathon: Yeah. Salim: Mega CD and all that’s gonna be [some] Keith: [That’s] crap though, Mega CD’s [crap.] Salim: [Oh] Mega CD’s good. Keith: Rubbish. (134602: 261–268)
Callum has long talks with his brothers about computer games. They discuss at length whether Super Nintendo is better than Megadrive or Sega Master Systems, and they challenge each other to see who knows most computer games (mainly typical boys’ games). They also discuss details of specific games, such as which character is the best in Final Fight and Fatal Fury: (60) Callum:
Jacob: Callum: Jacob: Callum: Jacob:
It’s not that good, cos it’s either Final Fight Cody or you have to be Hagar or you can only pick out of Hagar and Cody or it’s Final Fight Guy where you can only be Hagar or Guy. No, but you only like Cody or Hagar innit Mm, I know but …(2) it’s so stupid though innit? You didn’t like Guy ·unclearÒ I know, but that is so stupid though innit? No, it depends on the game pl= player.
(137803: 182–187)
The girls talk much less about computers, and they also talk less technically about them. In a conversation between Rebecca, Tess and Mary, Mary swithces on a Gameboy which they talk about for a few seconds. Then Rebecca asks her to switch it off because of the noise, and they immediately change topic and start to talk about beauty. Susie, 15, is one of the few girls who displays an actual interest in, and knowledge about, computer games. In contrast to the boys, however, she mainly talks about them in a non-technical way, such as which games she has played or would like to play. Norah seems less experienced than Susie when it comes to computer games, but she wants to invite her friends home to show them that she has actually got some games. The trouble is that she does not know how to set them up:
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(61) Norah: then if my dad’s not asleep, then I can show them all my wicked computer games, cos they don’t believe I have got some computer games. So they’re in Captain Comical that’s old and I can clock it and that Carita: [yeah, it’s ·unclearÒ] Norah: [it’s easy,] yeah, and I show then if I can remember the key though I haven’t played it in ages, and I’ll show them, (car passing) I’ll show them Duke, Newcombe if I can set it up, because sometimes I can’t set it up you see, cos my dad’s chang= keeps changing how you set it up, okay, and then there’s some other wicked games I can show them, I’ll have to remember them, cos half of them I don’t know how to set up I have to keep phoning my dad up at work or if she’s there then he has to come, and show me and he’s gonna embarrass me he’s gonna go, ·nvÒsigh·/nvÒ ·mimickingÒ‘God Norah, I’ve told you once’ (…) ·/Ò (136903:24–26)
3.1.8 ‘Bad’ things That the teenagers live in different worlds is particularly evident from the stories they tell about ‘bad’ things, such as drugs, violence, illicit activities and crime. The Hertfordshire pupils seem to be protected from most of it, although some of them have been involved in certain ‘illicit’ activities. One of the most dramatic stories told in Hertfordshire is about Kate, who once nearly ‘got busted’ by her teacher for smoking. Among Rebecca and her friends, the worst thing we hear is that Mary has been doped on Ecstasy. According to Mary, it happened only once and without her knowing it. We also hear Dylan talking about how he was banned from his local club for having beaten up a boy: (62) I’ve been banned from my local club. Cos I went up and this bloke was like he was like every time. He was only about two meters away from me and he was like shooting me in the back. I got all these massive bruises. So I walked up to him and I was about this far away yeah? And I just went ·unclearÒ right in his bollocks. (141405: 255)
In Hertfordshire, such stories are an exception, and we hear more about people who play cricket and go to Ascot race course to watch horse races. In Hackney and Tower Hamlets, however, stories about ‘bad’ things are more common.
The conversations
Agathon and his friends tell a story about a guy whose mother ‘had a fit and make him live on his own cos he took rocks’. They also talk about a ‘crazy’ man who looks like ‘one of them drug dealer smugglers from Africa or something like that’. From what the boys know, the man does voodoo, his sister has been killed, he himself has killed a man, and his mother and some girls have beaten him up. Mitch and Ion talk about a guy who smashed a car window with a stone. We also hear about Reg, some guy who beats up his mum, eats rotten food, and steals a lot without ever being caught by the police. Reg sounds like a frightening man, but Agathon knows how to handle him: (63) Ion: Kerry: Agathon:
Now that Reg is a bastard man, I’m telling you. …He’s a f=, he is a cunt man I tell you. Well obviously ·unclearÒ He’s i= no, it isn’t that too me I beat him up, he’s a little poof, but, he’s just a cunt to everyone, with, with that.
(134602: 151–153)
Mandy and her friends talk openly about drugs, even though they admit it must sound strange to the researchers listening to the recordings: (64) Holly: Sniffing some coke ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Mandy: ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ They’re go= gonna get this tape right and they’re just gonna think what the fuck! …None of the other people are probably gonna have stuff like this on their tape. (134202: 26–27)
Susie seems to be involved in few ‘bad’ activities, but she is a tough girl who knows how to defend herself in a fight (cf. 8.3.1): (65) Yeah. And Wyon go= she goes no it weren’t me, it weren’t me. Listen, I goes, I don’t care who it was but you better not come and knock for me no more because my Mum’s screwing with you. And she come knocking for me about two month’s later. I was washing my Dad’s car, she got the hosepipe, put it over me. She was going out to a party, I got a bucket of water, threw it over her head! She was going out to a party. And she got me again, cos I wasn’t bothered if she got me, you know what I mean, cos I, I was in my house I could get changed quickly and it was hot. So I just got another bucket, threw it over her head, stuck the hose up her jumper, believe, she had to go home. She, she weren’t going partying till she got changed. I was cracking up so hard. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Only thing I was screwing about was, she got my trainers all wet and I was going you
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bitch, they’re the only pair I got, the decent pair! And she’s got ·unclearÒ got the bucket of water and I went boosh! She went, ‘no don’t! And I said, no I won’t, I walked past her and I went boosh over her head. (132707:141)
3.1.9 Race relations Susie is the only recruit who has recorded conversations where race is a topic. Susie and her friends, who describe themselves as ‘black’, talk at length about racial issues (cf. 8.1). In (66), Susie, Allie and Kate talk about how few roles there are in film for black actors, and how ‘blackness’ is marked and ‘whiteness’ unmarked in the American film industry, as well as in society in general: (66) Susie:
But that’s, but that’s what I mean, they’re making, they’re saying let’s make, when the white people make films black and white people watch them, they’re not specifically made for white people, not specifically made for black people, it just happens to be white actors. But when they make a black film, they make a black film for black people to sit and watch. I’ve got it all on this tape Malcolm X, Linsey’s saying Malcolm X is brilliant, he was a black man, he was a nigger and Ryan was going shut up Ryan’s black too and she was going shut up! Malcolm X, stupid black nigger, do you know what I mean. But because they’re black it don’t make no difference, do you know what I mean. Allie: Cos [if we say it] Sharon: [We say it] Susie: But if I was to say it, it’s different. Like, Linsey goes to me, cos I’ve got a black kitten he goes, what are you gonna call it? I goes dunno. Goes call it Malcolm X. I goes shut up! He goes, call it, call it Ma= call it Martin X and then he says call it Nigger. I think Nigger’s a good name but, you know what I mean like, come here Nigger! But … it’s, it’s racist. If I’d a, if I were walking down the street going (makes kissing noise as if to call cat) Nigger! ·unclearÒ sorry! ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ (132901: 64–67)
In (67), Susie and her friends talk about and play with racial stereotypes. All participants in this conversation are black:
The conversations
(67) Linsey: Susie:
(…) Courtney: Linsey: Courtney: Linsey: Courtney: (…) Linsey: Courtney: Susie:
I’m black … and I’m a nigger! ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ… [Fuck you!] [Really? Really?] We didn’t know that. We didn’t know that. Sorry Linsey I thought you were Chinese, you know. I’m black and I’m proud of it. Oh! Black woman! I’m not black [I’m a] [Wow!] Chink. I’m a Chink. You’re a half Negro. I’m a half Negro. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ
(132614:69–104)
3.1.10 School All the recruits are students, and school is a common topic in many conversations. The school talk reveals enormous differences between the teenagers. There are the ‘good’ students who follow mainstream expectations, take school and school authority seriously, and conform to mainstream expectations (at least in public) — and there are the ‘bad’ students, who are more concerned about finding ways to bunk off. The Hertfordshire recruits are the ones who talk most about school. Not surprisingly — boarding school takes up a much larger part of the students’ life than state schools. The people they spend their leisure time with are the same people they go to school with, so it is only to be expected that they talk a lot about school. Many of them do their homework together, so we have lengthy conversations recorded in the school study about literature, geography, maths and so on. There are also a number of school corporate activities they take part in, and they talk about these as well. Chapel service seems to be the least popular activity, and several of them admit that they only participate because they are expected to. Other activities are more popular, such as the school theatre group and the church choir. It seems the teenagers from Hertfordshire are generally satisfied with being boarding school students. Occasionally they miss living with their families, but then again, living at school gives them a certain freedom from family life which they also appreciate. In (68), Jack, Les
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and Bradley evaluate the pros and cons of boarding schools as opposed to state schools, concluding that boarding school is superior: (68) Jack:
Bradley: Jack: Les: Bradley: Les: Jack: Les: Jack: Bradley: Les: Jack:
Boarding school sucks because basically you stay at school all the er term, (bell rings) loads of people [come from a= from abroad] [Then you go home and you’ve] got nothing to do cos so you don’t know many people and the people you do know are either older than you, or they all get Good thing about state schools is that they all live in your area, most of [them don’t they?] [Yeah,] yeah but they, and then I know but you don’t wanna be, I dunno but you don’t wanna get into that sort of crowd. These are much better than the state schools. [I know I meant for work and all this shit.] [No no you, no we] don’t [wanna get in, you don’t wanna get into] [No no, honestly I’ve, I’ve been to] state school and this is much better. …It’s better people, better work, better opportunities. …I mean at my state school I did no sport apart from PE, I didn’t play rugby, I didn’t do hockey, I didn’t play anything … there wasn’t the facilities we’ve got here.
(141902: 196–216)
For the other recruits, school is not such an all-pervasive topic, and takes up less of the recording time. Of course, they too talk about teachers (especially the ones they dislike) and about school work. Most of them complain about having too much school work and how difficult it is; only a few (mainly Simon and Ethan) complain that school is too easy and that the teachers do not know enough about their subjects. Some, of course, do not complain at all. Interestingly, one of the longest talks about school is recorded by two boys who apparently spend the least amount of time there, namely 14-year-old Alphie and Tony, who have been away from school so many times that they both have been visited at home by ‘some lady who works for the council’.
The conversations
Apparently, they have some problems at school, but we don’t get to know much about it, apart from a few comments (see also 4.3.4.2): (69) Tony:
I mean I wish I could get away from school. Wish I had somewhere to hide. Alphie: my mum (…) wants to take me to a psychiatrist or something. God. (140504: 176, 219)
The two boys talk about playing truant as an ‘addiction’, and discuss different strategies to stay away from school without their parents knowing. Apparently, playing truant is something they take a certain pride in doing: (70) Alphie: Tony: Alphie: Tony: Alphie: Tony:
Alphie: Tony: Alphie: Tony: Alphie: Tony: Alphie:
I’ve been away about thirty. You have? Yeah. Same here. But on [top of at least Christine] [·unclearÒ same] d’ya know that we was same way, maybe I’m a I’m a bit more ·unclearÒ. I’m holding the record for most days off. I’ve bunked on of Fridays. What bunked actually? Actually bunked. Walked out? Well like, [er pret= pretended] [Most times ·unclearÒ in class ·unclearÒ] to go home. Wh= er see that my sis=, eh a lot of the time my my sister like, okay my mum would phone up and go walk her walk to school with Alphie on Friday, and actually, I’m I think he might try something. Anyway I pretend to take ages in the toilet.
(140504: 147–159)
From talk about school, we now move on to the next part, the talk in school.
3.2 School talk 3.2.1 Teacher-student interaction Some of the recordings are done at school. These are mainly interactions between a teacher and students in the classroom. In some recordings, the
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teacher is lecturing and the students listen (more or less quietly). Others take the form mainly of question-answer sequences, the interaction being controlled (more or less successfully) by the teacher. It is interesting to see how some of the students adapt their language in these exchanges (71), while others do not even try (72): (71) Teacher: Johnny: Teacher: (…) Fredrick:
Teacher:
Fredrick: Teacher: Fredrick: Teacher:
Which i=, which sector is the house builder in? Secondary. Secondary. Cos he’s ma= making houses. Yeah, sir, you know you said the house builders are secondary if they’re making something, they’re also providing a service though aren’t they? But tha= the build= well so is the person who makes shoes. Cos if we didn’t have somebody making shoes, we’d all be walking round bare foot. See what I mean? Yeah. Yeah? A person who’s, makes the tables, yeah? He’s providing a service, but in th= the prime role, yeah? Mm. Okay?
(135907: 127–148)
(72) Teacher: Agathon:
Why do you think Shakespeare begins a play with the witches? Cos he feels like it.
(134401:120–121)
3.2.2 Classroom chat The classroom recordings also consist of group sessions, where the students work in small groups and are allowed to talk simultaneously. These can be quite noisy, and many students talk about everything but the topic they have been assigned. Not everyone, though: when Leonard’s class mates start digressing during a group session, Leonard suggests they get back to work: (73) Liam: Kerry: Liam:
Wankers and Playboys under his fucking bed, [he gave me a ·unclearÒ and I goes ·unclearÒ] [I know his dad] I go, I, I prefer Penthouse … actually.
The conversations
Leonard: Liam:
Well we’d better do some work you know. Oh yeah.
(137104: 153–157)
During the group sessions, one can sometimes hear the teacher in the background trying to break through the noise, but very often the students don’t let themselves be interfered with. From some of the classroom recordings, the teachers have good reasons to be suspicious of what the students are really doing and saying. In (74), Susie and Sharon are whispering about the teacher, who is looking at them: (74) Susie: Sharon: Susie: Sharon: Teacher: Sharon:
I hate him. …I really, I’ve never hated people as much as I hate the teachers in this school. …Let’s sneak out. … ·unclearÒ he’ll start watching ·unclearÒ He knows what we’re doing, he knows what we’re doing cos he’s standing there looking at us. … ·unclearÒ (shouting from a distance) You’re not allowed out, girls! Why?
(132906: 1–6)
3.3 Family talk 3.3.1 Introduction Some of the recruits have not recorded any family recordings at all. Simon explains why: (75) Simon: Abdullah: Simon: Abdullah:
I haven’t got anything of, talking to my parents right, cos I just don’t really. Oh [yeah.] [I] don’t hold conversations with my parents. Mhm.
(132503: 404–406)
On the other hand, some recruits have made recordings only because of their family. Nathan’s mother makes him leave the recorder on while he’s talking to her, since she is worried that he won’t finish his recording task on time: (76) Nathan:
I’ve got to give it back tomorrow.
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Mother: Nathan: Mother: Nathan: Mother: Nathan: Mother: Nathan: Mother: Nathan: Mother: Nathan: Mother: Nathan: Mother: (…) Nathan: Mother:
Do you? Is that all the time you have? And how many tapes are you supposed to make? Oh, it’ll be about seven. Seven?! Mhm. You’ve got to give it back tomorrow. Yeah. Oh Nathan, you’ve not done that very well then have you? Well no I’ve tot= done four. You’ve done four tapes? Well no but I mean I I’m on my third but I mean I’m, What? You know, I should have done four by tomorrow. When are you gonna do the other one then? Tomorrow before I give it back. … Just let it turn. What was last night between Holland and, England and England they’ll qualify for the World Cup? Do want it, oh, do you want it turned off? No I want you to talk.
(138604: 1–290)
A couple of the recruits recorded more family conversations than peer conversations. Wyatt, 13, is one of them. His father is a pubowner and almost half of Wyatt’s recordings are done in or outside the pub. Wyatt’s family and friends of the family — children, teenagers and adults — all participate together in these conversations. The other half of Wyatt’s recordings consists mainly of ritual insult sequences between Wyatt and his friends (cf. Chapter 8), and this explains why the statistics for Tower Hamlets usually deviates from the other boroughs. 3.3.2 How they talk at home The majority of the recruits have recorded only some conversations at home, and listening to these conversations, one really understands how children come to school with different communicative styles. Some of the teenagers (mainly those with a working-class background) seem well equipped with street cred and know how to handle the hard realities of life and how to defend themselves from verbal attacks (cf. 8.3.1). Others (mainly those with a middle-class background) have been treated so gently at home they will probably cry if
The conversations
someone shouts at them. However, they have been well prepared for polite, mainstream classroom interaction. Gwen belongs to the first category, and her family recordings largely explain her tough interactional style. Gwen describes her family as a ‘real Jamaican family’. Her mother is loud and noisy, shouting whether angry or happy, and her many children all seem to respect and adore her. They express a belief in a tough child-rearing style: they think parents should slap their kids so that they do not get spoiled. Talking about a little girl called Katrina, Gwen and her sisters all agree that she is spoilt because her parents ‘don’t beat her’. They also agree that they should slap their baby brother Rolex, in order to train him to endure: (77) Gwen: But Rolex is a baby as well boy. Shout at him, he crying! Silvia: That’s what they should at least beat him boy. You shout at him and he cry. (135207: 566–567)
In Gwen’s family, even politeness is taught in a rather tough manner. The way Gwen’s elder sister Dawn talks to little Courtneyde may sound rather aggressive and challenging to someone with middle-class sensibilities, but it is probably very efficient: (78) Dawn: Courtneyde: Dawn: (…) Courtneyde: Dawn: Courtneyde: Dawn: Courtneyde: Dawn: Courtneyde:
Courtneyde. Take that thing out your mouth. No What? You don’t tell me no. I’ll box you. I want a drink. (challenging) Ha? I want [a drink.] [Not I] want! What is this then? Could I have a drink please? A drink please? (challenging) Ah? A drink please?
(135205: 18–58)
The middle-class parents seem to treat their children in quite a different manner. They tend to keep their voices down, and expressions such as please and darling are much more frequently used in these interactions. Example (79) is from Norah’s home:
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(79) Mother: Norah:
Mother: Norah: Mother: (…) Mother: Norah: Mother: Norah:
Hi darling … erm Esmee’s here, erm can we just go up to Kilburn? to get some, pens and stuff and I need to get some money out of my why didn’t you do it on the way home? cos I need to get some money out [to get] [oh okay] alright darling, please don’t be long will you? no, what time shall I be back by? tea won’t be any longer than an hour, an hour and a half, shops shut at five, five thirty okay, I’ll go straight to my account and then go to Woolworth’s or something, saw nanny in Kilburn
(136601: 799–816)
The interaction between Chelsea and her mother is quite similar. In (80), Chelsea is asking her mother for help with an assignment. Her mother has been helping her for some time already, but Chelsea wants more help. Note how polite and softened the mother’s refusal is: (80) Chelsea: Mother: Chelsea: Mother: Chelsea: Mother:
mum yes darling I need help oh darling can I go to the toilet, I’ve got, I’ve got other things to do ·sighingÒoh fine·/Ò I don’t like helping this time of night, sorry, it’s half past ten.
(136502:37–42)
3.3.3 The generation gap In many of the family recordings, the generation gap is salient. As mentioned, Tommy thinks his parents are a ‘pain in the arse’, and the recordings reveal why: his mother is quite strict with him and wants to know everything about who he is with, where and when, and she tells him to be home early. When he tells her that he wants to go to a disco, she says that he should rather go to the theatre. She is obviously worried about him staying out late alone, and requires a detailed description of where he is going, who he is going with, when they will be home, etc. She says:
The conversations
(81) So you don’t come back by eleven I call the police. (139604: 67)
Other family conversations are more friendly, and many of the recruits seem to enjoy talking to their parents and learning from the older generation. Ethan, Charlie, Leonard and Dylan, for instance, have all recorded a number of long conversations with their parents, where they discuss such issues as politics, history, war, religion, travelling etc. Sometimes one is impressed by the patience with which some of the parents answer all the questions from their children, such as ‘What’s Hamlet about?’, ‘How come Arabs are so rich?’, ‘What do we need oil for?’, ‘Why are people criminals?’, ‘Was a micro chip like really big at one time?’, and ‘D’you reckon that there will be a one big nuclear war which will end the world?’
3.4 Summing up Listening to the COLT recordings, one gets bits and pieces of some very different life stories. Yet, as we said initially, there is something unmistakeably youthful in all of the conversations: The mixing of childish play and mature talk, the noise and movement, the exitement and sheer fun, it is all part of an intense and sometimes chaotic identity-formation that takes place during adolescence. The teenage years can be the best and the worst time in life, and in COLT we get examples of both. On the one hand, there is the popular and beautiful Rebecca who receives a letter from an anonymous admirer and is about to get her first car at the age of 15; there is the self-confident Tommy who wants to go to parties alone because then he can ‘get off’ with all the girls he wants to. On the other hand we have Hannah, ‘the schools’ laughing stock’, who is avoided by all the boys, and Zed who is going to rehab for his drug abuse. Fortunately, the majority of the teenagers seem to live ‘normal’ lives, and generally they seem quite happy and eager to make the best out of their lives, whatever their situation and background. As adults, we admire their youthful optimism and their openness to the future that lies ahead of them, and we see no reason to worry about leaving ‘the English language’ into the hands of the next generation.
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AUTHOR ""
TITLE "Slanguage"
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Chapter 4
Slanguage
Give me some of your slang. Susie, 14
Quite a few people would probably call teenage language ‘bad language’. Parents and teachers, for instance, who are often heard complaining about teenagers’ sloppy pronunciation, their way of cutting off sentences in the middle and letting the listener guess the rest, not to mention their use of slang, vague and dirty words, often in combination with a lot of ‘unnecessary’ smallwords, especially like, but also yeah and innit, would probably not hesitate to refer to such features as bad and impoverished or even as symptoms of linguistic decay. Andersson & Trudgill (1990), who list swearing, slang, jargon, misuse, fillers and small words, bad pronunciation and grammar among the linguistic features that people tend to complain about, argue, however, that it is ‘totally useless’ to criticize language for being ‘bad or impoverished’, since bad pronunciation, slang, swearing, and so on ‘cannot be judged as bad of themselves and for all time.’ (1990: 183). As we can gather from the beginning of Susie’s chat with Darren in (82) and her brief monologue in (83), there is no doubt that Susie is fully aware of what kind of language teenagers are expected to use: (82) Susie: Look record! …You fucking arsewipe Darren: Are you allowed to swear? Susie: Yes, that’s the whole point. Give me some of your slang. Darren: Ah. (132902: 18–21)
Susie dutifully instructs Darren to use as many slang words as possible for the benefit of the project team and future research, and in (83) she goes as far as teaching her future audience what the slang words mean: (83) I’m really, really bored so I just thought … seeing as I’m on my own I’d just tell you some slang … erm for teenage languages. There’s words like chief, wad, dude … they all mean you’re an idiot, a joker or a ·unclearÒ
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means, like, you make a fool of yourself a lot. Your arms, you’re dark and you’re out of order (132903: 1)
What we want to show in this chapter is that slang words, dirty and vague words are not distinct categories, but that we are dealing with words that are typically multifunctional, so that different functions are often intertwined. A reflection of this is that not only ordinary slang words but also the majority of the vague and dirty words met with in the COLT conversations are labelled ‘slang’ both in general dictionaries such as Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1987) and Chambers Concise 20th Century Dictionary (1985) and slang dictionaries, e.g. The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang (1992) and the recently published Cassell’s dictionary of slang (2000). In other words, slang does not only consist of what we generally perceive as slang, words like booze, chap, fag and grub, but also vague words such as stuff and thingy, dirty words like bitch, cunt and wanker, and smallwords like sort of and you know. Many of these words are difficult to place in a fixed category, but they are all part of slangy language. In order to cover all kinds of slangy language that is met with in COLT, we have opted for the superordinate concept of ‘slanguage’. What we mean by slanguage is illustrated in Figure 4.1, which is a modified version of the model proposed by Stenström (2000a). (For smallwords in terms of ‘interactional signals’ and ‘discourse markers’, see Stenström 1994.)
Definitions –
–
Proper slang words are words labelled slang in common dictionaries; general slang words are not related to a particular group or trend (e.g. booze, fag spooky); and specific slang words are group/trend related(e.g. joint, speed, spliff) Dirty words consist of taboo words, i.e. words regarded as offensive or shocking. They can either serve as slang words or as swear words. As ‘general’ slang words, they are taboo substitutes for an accepted (nonemotional) synonym in the standard language (piss somebody off, bugger off, screw up); as ‘reflectors’ they mirror the speaker’s state of mind (fucked-off, pissed-off). As swearwords, they can be used as intensifiers (fucking crap), abusives (you dickhead/sod/motherfucker) or expletives expressing strong feelings, or serving as an oath or curse (for fuck’s sake, shit).
Slanguage
Proper slang words
Dirty words
general specific slang words swear words
SLANGUAGE
Vogue words
Vague words
general reflectors intensifiers abusives expletives
set markers other
Proxy words
quotatives
Small words
hedges empathizers tags
Figure 4.1.A model of slanguage
–
–
– –
Vogue words are already existing words which have become fashionable for a short period of time (e.g. massive, paranoid, reckon) or which are suddenly used with a new sense (e.g. sad, wicked) Vague words are words whose meaning is very genereal, almost vacuous, and which are used instead of the adequate word (thingy), as fillers (whatisname), or as set markers (and that lot) Proxy words are substitutes for verbs of quotation, realized by BE like (I was like wow!) or the verb GO (he goes I didn’t do it). Smallwords are represented by ‘tags’ (innit, yeah), ‘hedges’ (just, like, sort of) and empathizers (you know).
A different way of looking at slanguage would be to regard it as a gradient, with proper slang words at one end and smallwords at the other. In what follows, slang (including dirty slang and vogue words), swearwords and vague words will be discussed in separate sections for the sake of convenience. (Proxy words and smallwords are dealt with in Chapters 5 and 6.) The question ‘what is slang?’ is notoriously difficult to answer. This is reflected in the lack of straightforward, all-covering definitions. Various
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characterizations are met with in the linguistic literature, including dictionaries and grammar books. Lighter (1978), for instance, identifies slang as ‘a taboo term in ordinary discourse with persons of higher social status or greater responsibility’, which is used instead of ‘a conventional synonym’ (1978: 14–16), while Quirk et al. (1985: 27) and Andersson & Trudgill avoid the problem of definition altogether by stating ‘what slang is and what it is not’ (cf. 1990: 69 ff). We have chosen to define as slang those words and expressions that are labelled ‘slang’ in the dictionaries. As regards dirty words, a scrutiny of some dictionaries shows that the term ‘dirty’ may be restricted to words ‘concerned with sex in an unpleasant way’ (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 1987: 288), or it may be used in a much wider sense to denote ‘an obscene word: a word for something, as a feeling, principle, or belief, that is regarded with disfavour at the present time’ (Chambers Concise 20th Century Dictionary 1985: 270). Jay (1992) uses the term ‘dirty’ for a whole gamut of words, such as words for cursing, profanity, blasphemy, taboo, obscenity, vulgarity, slang, epithets, insults and slurs, and scatology. But unlike Jay, we delimit the term dirty to taboo words, by which we mean words that are perceived as offensive by society at large, from slightly improper words like crap to plain obscene words like cunt, fuck and wanker. Dirty words consist of taboo words, which can either be used as slang or as swearwords, and which are mainly related to sex, religion and excretion. We cannot do without vagueness in communication, but it is not clear to what extent vagueness is really a blessing rather than a nuisance. Nor is it clear how vague language should be defined and what to include. Chambers Concise 20th Century Dictionary (1985: 1101), for instance, defines the word vague as ‘lacking precision or sharpness of definition: indistinct: blurred: lacking in character and purpose, or addicted to haziness of thought’, while Collins Cobuild Dictionary (1987: 1614) states in more general terms that vague ‘is used to describe things that people say or write that are not clearly explained or expressed, so that they can be understood in different ways.’. In our discussion of vague language, we have used Channell (1994) as a starting-point and means of comparison, adding what we think is typical of teenage language. Slang, including dirty slang words, is dealt with in Section 4.1; swearing, including dirty swearwords, is dealt with in Section 4.2; and vague language is dealt with in Section 4.3. In all three sections, frequencies are mainly given in the form of diagrams accompanied by relative frequencies, considering the uneven number of total words produced per gender, age and school borough. Social class has not been studied as a variable per se, since it coincides roughly
Slanguage
with school borough: Hackney and Tower Hamlets have mainly speakers from social class 3 (low), Camden and Barnet have speakers from class 1 (high) and 2 (middle), and Hertfordshire has mainly speakers from class 1.
4.1 Slang 4.1.1 General The following rather vague definition of slang is found in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 1987: 987), which says that slang is: very informal language that includes new and sometimes not polite words and meanings, is often used among particular groups of people, and is usu. not used in serious speech or writing.
Jay (1992: 6), who regards slang as a subcategory of ‘dirty words’, provides a slightly more specific definition: an informal nonstandard vocabulary composed typically of coinages, arbitrary changed words, and extravagant, forced, or facetious figures of speech.
And Eble (1996), among others, emphasizes the social aspect by stating that slang is: an ever changing set of colloquial words and phrases that the speakers use to extablish or reinforce social identity or cohesiveness within a group or with a trend or fashion in society at large.
What linguists and lexicographers alike seem to agree on is that slang includes words that are below the level of stylistically neutral language, and that, in addition to being group-related, it is innovative, playful, metaphorical and short-lived. Describing slang as short-lived is somewhat exaggerated, however, considering that quite a lot of slang words are old, or very old, and still used as slang words today. Take for instance the early 17th century word cock for ‘penis’ and the mid 17th century word grub for ‘food’. Other old slang words are completely outdated, and a person who ventured to use them today would no doubt be ridiculed. Why use slang then? Considering that teenagers are in fact expected to violate social taboos, there is of course all the more reason for them to use ‘their own language’ as a means of provocation and as a means of keeping the older generation outside, while at the same time strengthening the bonds within their
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own peer group. According to some sources, this tendency is stronger in male than female groups (e.g. Allen 1998: 881f). Whether that is true also for the boys and girls in COLT will be discussed in Section 4.1.2.3. Originally, as pointed out by Andersson & Trudgill (1990: 77), Allen (1998: 878), and others, slang was first used by criminals as their secret language before evolving into subcultural speech more generally. Jay (1992), too, states that slang is developed in certain sub-groups ‘for ease of communication. He mentions teenagers, musicians, drug users, etc., where slang ‘serves to identify members of the group’ (1992: 6). Admittedly, both musicians and drug users are likely to be easily recognized by their specific slang vocabulary, but teenagers to a lesser extent, unless they belong to a very specific sub-group. Teenage slang in general is not restricted to or focusing on a particular domain in the same way as slang terms related to, for instance, music or drugs. 4.1.2 Slang in COLT As the model of slanguage demonstrates (Fig 4.1), what we consider to be slangy language in COLT is realized not only by what is generally understood as slang, here referred to as ‘proper’ slang words, but also by dirty words, or taboo words, defined as slang in the dictionaries, words such as pissed in the sense of ‘drunk’, and pissed-off in the sense of ‘annoyed’ and dick and prick in the sense of ‘fool’, which are all used connotatively,1 i.e. in their non-literal sense. Both types are illustrated in (84), where Michele and Kate are gossiping about some school friends: (84) Michele: Kate: Michele: Kate: Michele: Kate: Michele: Kate: Michele: Kate: Michele:
What’s happened with Fanny? Fanny who? ·nameÒ Don’t know. They don’t know yet. Why what’s supposed to happen then? Well she was ·unclearÒ Dave in lesson time apparently. Yeah I know. Isn’t she gonna get a shite on? ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Oh! Oh gossip! Gossip! George and Rosie have just had a cuss outside. Yeah I know.
1.Jay (1992: 10–12) discusses connotative and denotative usage in relation to dirty words.
Slanguage
Kate: Michele: Kate: Michele: Kate: Michele: Kate: Michele: Kate: Michele: Kate:
It’s obscene. How fucking disgusting. It is rough, I’m sorry [it really makes me sick.] [How desperate is he?] How desperate is he? Very, he must be desperate because she is such a rough tart. What is his problem? I don’t know. God has he got no taste? No he hasn’t at all. God. God. God. God again ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ
(142302: 23–44)
The word cuss, which obviously means ‘kiss’ in this context, in accordance with the OED (1989 IV: 165), rather than ‘curse’, as defined in Cassell’s dictionary of slang (2000: 304), is regarded as a proper slang word, while rough tart is an example of dirty slang. So is the expression get a shite on, the meaning of which is uncertain, and which is perhaps best explained as an example of idiosyncratic usage. The word fucking, on the other hand, illustrates the use of a swearword as an intensifier (cf. Chapter 6). 4.1.2.1Proper slang The most frequent words in the category of proper slang words in COLT are displayed in Table 4.1. These items make up 42 per cent of the total number of proper slang words. Two of the words listed, massive and rough, belong to what we have defined as ‘vogue’ words in the model of slanguage. The model divides the proper slang words into ‘general’ and ‘specific’. Among the general slang words there are words such as bimbo, freak, get busted, laters (‘see you later’), stoned and yobbo. The specific slang words are group-related, and here we find, for instance, crack, joint and junkie, which are related to drugs, and grubber, prep, quad and san, which seem to be typical boarding school words: (85) I, I get the feeling that because they don’t really know, especially if you’re caught pissing around in quad yeah, and er it’s by a teacher that you don’t know, a ma= or a master or something, they don’t pay much attention to it because you’re a girl and they don’t know you, I get that feeling that caught us then yeah (142602: 276)
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Table 4.1.The top ten proper slang words Item
Frequency
man sad wicked mate bloke guy cool massive rough quid
358 140 132 84 84 77 75 58 56 55
Total
1119
A survey of the proper slang words in terms of wordclass belonging showed that nouns predominate over adjectives, verbs and adverbs, in that order: almost half of the words are nouns, nearly one third are adjectives, one fifth are verbs and the rest adverbs. The adjective group includes participial forms such as bunged up, clapped out, and hacked off, while the verb group includes collocations such as get busted, hit the bars, have a tinkle and pull somebody up. Most of the nouns and adjectives were found to have either a pejorative meaning or sexual connotations. These words are used to ‘evaluate’ people and generally reflect the speaker’s real or pretended attitude to a third person, a person spoken about. Some depreciating nouns and adjectives are listed in Figure 4.2: Nouns meaning ‘foolish/worthless’
Adjectivs meaning stupid/mad/bizarre’
dill div dude dweeb git moron prat tosser wad wimp
batty freaky gormless kinky mental naff nuts nutty spastic/spaz thick
Figure 4.2.Proper slang nouns and adjectives.
Slanguage
All these words have an ‘unmasked’ accepted synonym, which either denotes some negative characteristic or should be avoided for other reasons, such as words denoting sexual traits or habits. The large number of slang words and expressions meaning ‘drunk’ (conked, dry, off one’s face, pasted, twisted, wasted, wrecked, etc.) is a clear indication that drunk itself is too straightforward and should be avoided. Verbs belonging to proper slang are for instance bust (‘arrest’), doss (‘lie down to sleep’), gob (‘swallow’), snog (‘hold and kiss’). Some of the few slang adverbs are for yonks, in a mo, and indeedee. 4.1.2.2Dirty slang The most commonly used dirty slang words in COLT are listed in Table 4.2. Table 4.2.The top ten dirty slang words Item
Frequency
crap arse dick bastard bitch take the piss fuck wanker suck cunt
96 65 62 61 51 50 47 40 39 36
Total
547
The top ten items make up 41 per cent of the total number of dirty slang words, a percentage that is almost identical to that of the proper slang words. The difference is that the dirty slang words are only half as common, totally speaking, as the proper slang words. A survey of wordclass belonging showed that half of the dirty slang words are nouns, one fifth are adjectives, one third are verbs and the remaining per cent adverbs. Compared to the proper slang words, the order is reverse for adjectives and verbs. Here it is the verbs that dominate over the adjectives. As in the case of the proper slang words, the adjective category includes participial forms (e.g. buggered up, crapped out, pissed off, pissed out), and the verb category includes collocations (e.g. get the hump, give a crap, give a shit). Many verbs are
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phrasal verbs (pig out, piss about). Regular adjectives are represented by, for instance, bitchy, dickish, and horny, while the only adverb is shittily. In the large majority of cases, the tabooness is related to sex, especially male and female genitalia (cock, dick, prick and cunt, fanny, pussy), sexual intercourse (fuck, shag, screw), oral sex, (blow job, suck), female (!) promiscuity (slag, slut, tart, whore) and homosexuality (lezzy, faggot). There are more slang words for male than female homosexuals. Other words and expressions are related to excretion (cack, crap, piss, shit) and to the animal kingdom (bitch, cow, dog). In those cases where the dirty words are directed to the person spoken to we have regarded them as abusives, which places them in the category of swearwords. The difference is illustrated in (86) and (87): (86) Joseph’s such a power crazed bastard nowadays, really pisses me off (138904: 25)
(87) That’s what I’m doing you silly bastard. (134401: 164)
Intensifiers such as bloody and fucking, which most people will regard as strongly offensive, and not part of polite language, have also been regarded as swearwords. The following examples illustrate how boys and girls sometimes talk about each other: Boys about boys But the guy is an arsehole He’s a gay bent bastard Unbelievably crap person and sad Acts like a complete dick to try and get attention Miguel’s a sad faggot He’s a knob Oh what a penis He’s so shit He’s a fat wanker Girls about boys He’s a complete arsehole Joseph’s such a power crazed bastard nowadays really Rick’s a cunt He’s the biggest knob out, he is a real cock He’s a right little shit He’s a slag
Slanguage
Boys about girls She’s a bitch bitch She’s a stupid cow She’s a dick She’s a right fuck She’s a tart Girls about girls Kelly’s a little bitch She was such a soppy little cow She is such a rough tart She’s one dirty whore There are more examples in COLT to illustrate how boys use dirty words about boys than about girls. Girls do not use dirty words about boys to the same extent as the boys do, but they can be quite nasty about each other. Interestingly, the boys use the word dick when talking about girls, while the girls use both cunt and slag for boys, but bitch, cow and dog are reserved for girls. Nobody says about a boy that ‘he is a right fuck’, but ‘she is a right fuck’ occurs. On the other hand, there is no case of ‘she is a bastard’. 4.1.2.3Slang in relation to gender, age and school borough Tables 4.3 to 4.5 show the relation between slang and gender, slang and age and slang and school borough. Table 4.3.Slang and speaker gender Gender
Proper slang
Dirty slang
Slang words
n
per 1000
n
per 1000
n
per 1000
male female
1724 916
8.0 4.6
796 523
3.7 2.6
2520 1439
11.7 7.2
Total
2640
3959
Total words 216224 200390 416614
The male speakers use slang relatively more often than the female speakers. This tendency prevails both with respect to proper slang words and dirty slang words, although the difference is less pronounced in the case of the dirty slang words. The fact that the difference is fairly small as regards the use of dirty slang is in line with Allen (1998), who states that taboo expressions that used to
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belong to ‘the restricted speech of male subculture (…) is today losing its exclusiveness and isolation (1998: 882). Table 4.4.Slang and speaker age totala Age group
Slang words
per 1000 words
Total words
10–13 14–16 17–19 20–29 30+
952 2408 418 7 37
10.6 10.7 12.2 6.7 1.7
89836 225102 34341 1050 21855
Total
3822
a
372184
Age group 0–9 and unidentified speakers are not accounted for.
The 17–19 year-olds use relatively more slang totally speaking than the other age groups, followed by the 14–16 year-olds and, very closely, the 10–13 year-olds. From age 20 onward, there seems to be a gradual decrease in the use of slang, though we do not have enough evidence to draw any conclusions, as regards especially the 20–29 age group. Table 4.5 shows a breakdown of the figures in 4.4 into proper and dirty slang per gender. Table 4.5.Proper and dirty slang in relation to speaker age and gender Age group
Proper slang male
Dirty slang female
male
female
n
per 1000
n
per 1000
n
per 1000
n
per 1000
10–13 14–16 17–19
513 1009 113
5.7 4.5 3.3
102 574 194
1.1 2.5 5.6
303 437 28
3.4 2.0 0.8
34 388 83
0.4 1.7 2.4
Total
1625
870
769
506
Both the male and the female speakers use more proper slang than dirty slang. This is particularly obvious in the 10–13 age group, where the boys use more dirty slang than any other age group. Among the girls, it is the 17–19 year olds that dominate. The 10–13 year old girls apparently use very few dirty slang words. The Tower Hamlets speakers use more slang, totally speaking, than the
Slanguage
Table 4.6.Slang and school borough total School borough
Slang words
per 1000
Total words
Hackney Tower Hamlets Camden Barnet Hertfordshire
1105 421 492 545 1396
8.9 13.1 5.9 8.6 10.8
123392 32244 83266 63038 129588
Total
3959
431528
speakers from the other school boroughs, followed by the Hertfordshire speakers, while the speakers from Camden use least slang. The rich use of slang in Tower Hamlets is due to the long ritual insult sequences recorded in that borough (cf. Chapter 8). Table 4.7.Proper and dirty slang per school borough School borough
Proper slang
Dirty slang
Total
n
per 1000
n
per 1000
Hackney Tower Hamlets Camden Barnet Hertfordshire
739 231 347 398 925
6.0 7.7 4.2 6.3 7.1
366 190 145 147 471
3.1 4.5 1.7 2.3 3.6
Total
2640
1319
1105 421 492 545 1396 3959
As Table 4.7 shows, proper slang is relatively more frequent than dirty slang in all the boroughs. It is most often used in Tower Hamlets, followed by Hertfordshire, Barnet and Hackney and least common in Camden. When the teenagers themselves talk about slang, it is generally about other speaker groups’ use of slang. Mandy and her friends, for instance, often talk about ‘ragas’2 and the way they behave, dress and talk. They think that ragas
2.Raga is a short form for ragamuffin, i.e. ‘a person, typically a child, in ragged dirty clothes’ (The New Oxford Dictionary of English 1998: 1530). In COLT, the word is used to describe adolescents with regional connotations who represent a particular youth culture, music and/or life style.
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are ‘fucked’, ‘fucking crap’, ‘bloody thick’, and that they ‘never grow up’. Their relationship to raga culture seems to be close and distant at the same time. They go to Jamaican parties, listen to reggae music, take drugs, and they are familiar with the vocabulary and accent of Jamaicans. Yet, they position themselves as being outside this language. When talking about ragas, they always put on a Jamaican or African/Afro-Caribbean accent and speech style, showing that this is the speech of ‘someone else’, and they bracket the mimicry with tokens of laughter, thus evaluating — and further distancing themselves from — the utterance. Two commonly used expressions in this connection are ya man and mash up, as in (88): (88) Mandy: What if there’s like a book published in a, in about a couple of years time about the children’s language many: ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Mandy: ·laughingÒwhat the fuck’s they gonna think?·/Ò Joel: ·unclearÒ All the kids in ·place nameÒ just seem to go ·mimicking Jamaican accentÒ ya man ·unclearÒ mash up this place·/Ò (134103: 286–287)
However, the teenagers’ metatalk is more often concerned with swearwords than with slang words, although they often refer to swearing as slang.
4.2 Swearing In their discussion about what is and what is not ‘bad language’, Andersson & Trudgill (1990) argue that ‘[n]o word is in itself bad. It is bad only in the eyes of those who evaluate and look at the language’ (1990: 35). The general opinion is, however, that swearing is bad (1990: 53), and, with reference to taboo words, that there are words that ‘we are not supposed to say’ (1990: 55). In a similar vein, Jay argues that ‘the pragmatics of usage, or how the words function in use, is more important than fitting the words into grammatical or etymological categories.’ (1992: 1) and, moreover, that ‘[w]ords that are inhibited or taboo are not necessarily obscene’; ‘[w]hether a word is taboo or not fluctuates as a function of the speaker-listener relation.’ (1992: 13). Jay mentions bitch, which would not be offensive when uttered by a dog-breeder but would definitely be perceived as offensive if directed to a female colleague, and fuck, which is not a suitable word in the presence of children but might well be used among friends without causing bad feelings.
Slanguage
Different types of swearing can be distinguished. Ljung (1986) distinguishes between ‘aggressive swearing’, which reflects the speaker’s emotions, and ‘social swearing’, which speakers use to strengthen group affinity; the stronger the group affinity the more swearing (1986: 14–15). He also points out that, despite the fact that swearing is considered to reflect bad behaviour, lack of education and linguistic poverty, men in particular are strongly tempted to swear, since swearing is also related to such positive qualities as independence, naturalness and forcefulness, which are all to do with ‘covert prestige’3 (1986: 19). Judging by some of the swearing in COLT, another attribute that seems highly relevant is ‘exhibitionist’. It is very obvious that some of the boys in particular love to perform by using dirty words when being aware that the tape is running. All three types of swearing are richly representeed in the corpus, but with a predominance of social and exhibitionist swearing. Jay (1999) discusses ten myths about cursing, some of which are highly relevant to what is going on in teenage talk. One thing to remember at this point, however, is that ‘cursing’ for Jay includes a whole range of categories: ‘swearing, obscenity, profanity, blasphemy, name calling, insulting, verbal aggression, taboo speech, ethnic-racial slurs, vulgarity, slang, and scatology’ (1999: 9). But if we understand him correctly, it is all a matter of using dirty words. The following myths are of particular interest in connection with teenage talk (1999: 257–259): Myth 6: Myth 7: Myth 8: Myth 10:
Cursing is mainly a problem for the teenage years. Cursing is a habit of the undereducated and lower classes. People are cursing more than ever before. Cursing is due to an impoverished lexicon and laziness.
Jay dismisses Myth 6 by arguing that cursing has to do with context rather than age per se and also that cursing survives a whole lifetime ‘because it is learned early and learned deeply’, though, admittedly, ‘teenagers may do more cursing in public’ (1999: 257). Considering all the swearing in COLT, we are quite convinced that this last point is correct. Myth 7 is dismissed as a matter of ‘linguistic snobbery’, since ‘cursing is classless’ (ibid), and Myth 8, since we have no way of verifying what happened in the past. As regards Myth 10, Jay argues that curse words are not substitutes when speakers cannot find the ‘right’ word but caused by ‘neurological, psychological, and sociocultural forces’ (1999: 259). This section will show whether Jay’s objections are confirmed by the present data.
3.For the term ‘covert prestige’ see e.g. Trudgill 1974.
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4.2.1 Swearing in COLT Those who fear that swearwords have lost all their meanings, and that teenagers have no respect for taboos are mistaken. Indeed, the teenagers are fully aware of linguistic taboos, and they know very well in what situations swearing is inappropriate. This does not mean that they do not flout expectations of appropriateness, but at least they show that they are very much aware that they are being inappropriate. In fact, swearing is the single most discussed linguistic aspect of their language, but they show vastly different attitudes to swearing. Some try to avoid swearing on tape, some get carried away and want to swear as much as possible, some swear inadvertently and want to wipe it off the tape when they realize what they have said. Some even try to get others to swear on tape without their knowing, so that they can tease them afterwards or use the swearing as a threat, as Susie does in (89): (89) Susie:
It’s a laugh man. Cos you were, you’re all sitting there right, and you all talking like, like … and bring the motherfuckers down! I was just sitting there taping. That’s why I was la=, cos when you were going, what you laughing at you flat chested cow? I was laughing and you were getting the hump with it … cos I knew I had it all on tape. Lesley: I didn’t call you a flat chested cow. Susie: Yo=, no it was Gareth. You know like when you go to Gareth, ah no Gareth. You should say to Gareth, ah no I didn’t say anything. And he said, I had all that and that’s why every time you called me something I just kept laughing cos I had it on tape! Lesley: Means you could have played it to blooming anyone. Susie: Could have played it to anyone. …(6) See how good I am to you? I didn’t even bother play it to anyone. I just thought, yeah, I could just get him [into big shit now!] Lesley: [If you did I’d beat shit] out of you! I’d Susie: Oh no! (132610: 12–69)
Even the most obscene words do not seem to offend the COLT teenagers, and they generally do not hesitate to use foul language in front of the microphone. In (90) we meet Tommy’s older sister Regina, who does not miss the opportunity to shock the research team and prospective corpus users by her choice of vocabulary:
Slanguage
(90) Regina: Tommy:
Regina: Tommy: Regina:
Tommy I want you to piss off, because I have an exam tomorrow. But I don’t care … She don’t know what to say. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ. You’re allowed, fuck off, you’re allowed to say that. You’re allowed to swear as much as you like. Are you? Yeah. ·shoutingÒFuck fuck fuck fuck!·/Ò·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ ·laughingÒI’m gonna fail GCSE tomorrow I’m gonna fail!·/Ò
(139501: 24–28)
Bradley, on the other hand, is struck by bad conscience when he realizes that his use of rude words has been recorded, although, as Nicolas points out, it does not really matter what he says, since the speakers have been promised anonymity: (91) Bradley: Johnny: Bradley: Nicolas: Bradley: Kerry: Nicolas: Brett: Kerry: Nicolas: many: Johnny: Brett: Nicolas: Kerry: Nicolas:
It’s fucking brilliant The one who’s [down here as well?] [Shit they didn’t record] that did they? It doesn’t matter. Well I said a rude word. ·nvÒlaugh·/Ò [Well no it doesn’t matter er] [Anonymity guaranteed.] it doesn’t matter [nobody’s nobody’s got ano= anonymity] [Anonymity] ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒpissing hell Pissing hell! Anona= anona= ·shoutingÒanonymity·/Ò Yeah. is guaranteed so it doesn’t really matter.
(142103: 90–106)
Most of the swearing occurs in the peer recordings, since the majority of the teenagers watch their language in the presence of parents and teachers. Table 4.8 shows the most common swearwords. The top ten items make up 81 per cent of the total number of swearwords. This means that the top ten swearwords are twice as common in relation to the total number compared with proper and dirty slang (Sections 4.1.2.1 and 4.1.2.2). It also means that the teenagers’ repertoire of swearwords is rather
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Table 4.8.The top ten swearwords Item
Frequency
fucking shit fuck bloody hell fuck off bollocks bastard bitch damn
362 324 256 219 105 77 69 55 51 38
Total
1556
narrow. The same words tend to be used again and again. Unlike the proper and dirty slang words, not all swearwords can be placed in a specific wordclass category. This is due to the large number of formulae (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 852), i.e. expressions such as Jesus, ah shit, and sod, and collocations, such as for fuck’s sake, what the hell, and get the fuck off. These expressions account for more than half of all the swearwords. Among words belonging to the regular wordclass categories, nouns make up a little over one fifth, verbs one tenth and adverbs slightly less than a tenth. In the swearword category, we distinguish between ‘intensifiers’, ‘abusives’ and ‘expletives’. These are illustrated in examples (92)–(94): (92) It’s bloody difficult, innit? (141907: 13)
(93) And listen to this you fucking bastard! (135804: 23)
(94) Oh bloody hell, this is giving me a headache. (133202: 15)
The following examples show abusives are used by the boys and the girls whithin and across gender boundaries: Boys to boys Oh you burk! Bloody chiefer You are a dick!
Slanguage
I would like to see your Amiga dickhead Shut up you stupid little Portuguese motherfucking git What you doing? Peanut head! Shut your fucking gob you little wanker Girls to girls You’re such an irritable bitch int ya? You stupid cow You cunt You fucking slag You’re such a whore Girls to boys What are you doing here you cunt? Boys to girls ??? The reason for the lack of examples of girls abusing boys and boys abusing girls is only partly due to the relatively small number of mixed conversations. It has more to do, it seems, with the fact that the boys tend not to confront the girls with verbal abuse and vice versa. 4.2.1.1Swearing in relation to gender, age and school borough Let us now look at how swearing is used across gender, age and school boroughs. (For total number of words per gender and age group, see Tables 4.3 and 4.4.) Table 4.9.Swearing, speaker gender and age Age group
Male
Female
n
per 1000
n
per 1000
0–9 10–13 14–16 17–19 20+
2 360 739 69 8
1.3 4.0 3.3 2.0 4.0
2 38 515 108 19
1.3 0.4 2.3 3.1 0.9
Total
1178
5.4
682
3.4
Table 4.9 shows that, while the boys just over five swearwords per thousand words, the girls use only a little more than three. Maybe this should be seen as
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a reflection of the fact that boys are generally expected to be tougher and more competitive than girls and are therefore ‘allowed’ to use dirtier words and more of them than girls. According to Jay (1992: 37), boys’ tendency to use more dirty words (even in public) may begin as early as age 5, and ‘[t]his trend of gender differences, where males use more dirty words and use them more frequently, will continue through adulthood. In the present material, this trend is only confirmed up to age 16. The table shows that swearing is more frequent in the 17–19 female age group than in the male. Males seem to dominate in the 20+ group, but the figures are too low to allow generalisations. Those who swear most are definitely the 10–13 year old boys, who are also the ones that dominate when it comes to the use of dirty slang. Let us now consider in which of the school boroughs swearing is most frequent. This is displayed in Table 4.10. (For total number of words per school borough, see Table 4.6.) Table 4.10.Swearing and school borough School borough
Swearwords
per 1000 words
Hackney Tower Hamlets Camden Barnet Hertfordshire
603 200 275 272 626
4.9 6.2 3.3 4.3 4.8
Total
1976
Swearing is obviously more common among the lower-class speakers in Tower Hamlets (especialy in ‘conflict talk’; cf. Chapter 8) than among speakers from the other school boroughs and least common among the speakers from Camden. Table 4.11 shows the top ten of all the dirty words, including both dirty slang and swearwords. We notice that the girls use the same dirty words as the boys do, but that there is a difference in frequency: the boys use more of them than the girls, with the exception of bloody, and, in particular, god, which occurs much more often as a taboo word in the girls’ conversations. On average, the difference is 6.6 versus 4.2 tokens per thousand words. Susie and some of her friends have a long discussion about favourite swearwords. Example (95) is an extract from that conversation:
Slanguage
Table 4.11.The top ten dirty words in relation to gender Item
Male
Female
fucking shit fuck god bloody crap bastard dick hell bollocks
280 255 218 161 140 95 90 72 67 58
152 134 92 280 142 52 26 24 42 32
Total
1436
976
7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
girls
boys
Figure 4.3.Relative frequencies of dirty words by gender
(95) Susie:
We come to an agreement and that’s our biggest word, fuck. I’ve got everyone’s, oi, Abdullah! What’s your favourite swear word? … Caryl: Bollocks! Sharon: I think mine’s probably Susie: Mine’s like, cunt and things like that. Allie: Usually shit and fuck, I think are my vocabulary. Susie: Yeah, or oh shit, you cunt!
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Allie: Susie:
Or shite is also another one Yeah, or, or, or, budging hell
(132901: 316)
For comparison with adult language in the entire country, Table 4.12 shows the top ten dirty words in COLT and the BNC. As in Table 4.11, no distinction has been made between swearing and non-swearing. The asterisks indicate that a specific item represents all inflected forms and derivations. Table 4.12: The top ten dirty words in COLT and the BNC COLT fuck* god shit* bloody piss* crap* bastard hell bitch* dick* bollocks
873 457 435 299 193 154 122 115 117 98 94
Total
2957
BNC bloody god fuck* hell crap* shit* bugger jesus damn bollocks sod
3250 2616 2307 970 270 620 178 228 114 141 86 10780
Contrary to what one might expect, the top ten dirty words are in fact more common among the adults in the BNC than among the teenagers in COLT. One reason is probably that some of the recruits recorded classroom talk, i.e. teacher talk, and another that the teenagers avoid dirty words when they talk to their parents, especially the (upper) middle class teenagers. Six of the words occur in both corpora (fuck, god, shit, bloody, crap, hell), but the order of frequency is different. The favourite word in COLT is fuck, and the one in the BNC is bloody. Words that are not among the top ten in COLT are bugger, jesus, damn and bollocks, and those coming further down the list in the BNC than in COLT are piss, bastard, bitch and dick. It is also interesting to compare the male/female distribution of dirty words in Jay’s American data with the distribution in COLT (Table 4.9). His data consists of dirty words recorded in college surroundings in Los Angeles on the west coast and Boston on the east coast. It should be noticed, however, that the
Slanguage
1.2 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0
adults
teenagers
Figure 4.4.Relative frequencies of dirty words in COLT and the BNC
data collection techniques differed between COLT and Jay’s material.4 Jay’s material consists of altogether 640 dirty words used in public, which were recorded on cards by researchers. Moreover, the informants differ in age. Table 4.13.The East Coast top ten (cf. Jay 1999: 264) Item
Male
Female
Total
fuck shit god hell (jesus)(christ) bitch ass damn piss(ed) goddamn
117 55 5 23 23 8 16 9 9 13
120 54 40 14 10 19 8 13 13 6
237 109 45 37 33 27 24 22 22 19
Total
278
297
575
4.A description of the sampling technique is found in Jay (1992).
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Unlike what we found in COLT, it is the female speakers who are the most frequent users of dirty words totally speaking in Jay’s material. Two words, fuck and shit, account for 41 per cent of the occurrences, and the top ten words account for 90 per cent of the data, which is an even higher figure than was reached in COLT. Since Jay’s material does not consist of tape recordings, the frequency of dirty words in relation to number of spoken words is impossible to compare. Not unexpectedly, the word fuck tops the list for both females and males, but even more interesting to notice is that it is more commonly used by females than by males. The fact that god is more common in female than in male talk, in contrast, agrees with what we found in COLT (see Stenström 1995 for a similar result in the London-Lund Corpus). Bloody, which is among the four most common words in COLT does not appear at all in the top ten East coast American data. Nor do crap, bastard and dick. On the other hand, damn and goddamn are ranked much lower in COLT, where ass appears in the form of arse.5
4.3 Vague words 4.3.1 General Vagueness in language is said to be a requirement for communication to be adequate (e.g. Daitz 1956) and to be ‘part of our taken-for-granted world’ (Channell 1994: 4). The consequence of this is that we generally pay no attention to it. One characteristic of vagueness, which largely explains why vague words are such frequent features of the COLT conversations, is that it is related to the degree of formality, or rather informality, of the situation; the less formal the situation the more vagueness there will be. This is very obvious in (96), where Tommy is asked to explain to his 16-year old sister Regina what the COLT project is all about: (96) Tommy: Regina: Tommy:
and they like wanna see like how we talk and all that. [You know] [Yeah] rastafarian style and all [·unclearÒ]
5.More about swearing in Bynes (1998).
Slanguage
Regina: Tommy: Regina: Tommy:
[Who wants who] wants to see how you talk? Er it’s, whatsit some Nor= Norwegian thing Are you taping? No it’s rewinding!
(139501: 11–17)
Despite the overuse of vague expressions on Tommy’s part at the expense of explicitness, Regina does not ask for clarification. She probably gets the gist of what the project is about despite the vague expressions and is maybe not really interested in the exact details. Tommy, on his part, does not bother to go into detail when talking to his sister, although he is probably quite able to be more informative, and would be in a less informal situation. Channell emphasizes that vague language is ‘neither all “bad” nor all “good”’ (1994: 3), but that what matters is that it is ‘used appropriately’. Her study shows, she says, that both speakers and writers ‘tailor their language to make it suitable to the situation’ (ibid), and this is exactly what Tommy does when he is talking to Regina. A precise definition of vagueness is difficult to arrive at, since there are unlimited ways of being vague in language. Channell (1994:20) finally arrives at a working definition, which says that a word is vague if: a. it can be contrasted with another word or expression which appears to render the same proposition; b. it is ‘purposely and unabashedly vague’; c. its meaning arises from the ‘intrinsic uncertainty’ referred to by Peirce6 According to Crystal & Davy (1975: 112 ff), there is a whole range of lexical items in English that express ‘total vagueness’, such as thingy, thingummy and whatsit. Another type of vagueness is represented by so-called ‘summarizing phrases’, exemplified by and things, and so on, and and everything (cf. ‘set markers’ in Section 4.3.4). Moreover, there are vague generic terms and collective nouns like bags of and oodles of, and approximations in the form of approximate numbers or quantities and the ‘approximating’ suffix -ish. Channell (1994) includes ‘vague additives’, i.e. words and phrases that are added ‘to what would otherwise be a precise statement’ (e.g. A team of around
6.According to Peirce (1902), who was one of the first scholars to talk about vagueness in language, ‘[a] proposition is vague where there are possible states of things concerning which it is intrinsically uncertain whether, had they been contemplated by the speaker, he would have regarded them as excluded or allowed by the proposition.’ (1902: 748).
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ten people), ‘vagueness by choice of vague words’, i.e. words that are ‘unabashedly vague’ (e.g. thingummy, loads of), and ‘vagueness by implicture’, ‘where an apparently precise sentence can be used and understood to have a vague meaning’ (e.g. Sam is six feet tall). More precisely, Channell discusses vagueness in terms of: – – – – – –
approximators vague quantifiers adverbs of frequency words referring vaguely to categories placeholders vagueness by implicature
(around ten people) (loads of) (seldom) (and something) (thingy) (six feet tall)
As regards reasons for using vague language, Crystal & Davy (1975: 11) mention that vagueness can be due to memory loss or lack of a suitable exact word in addition to degree of formality, subject of conversation and a deliberate wish to maintain the atmosphere. In addition, one could mention lack of knowledge, which is conveniently hidden behind vague words. But the use of vague expressions is not only governed by cognitive factors. Social factors play a crucial role, especially among teenagers. In the teenage world it is cool to be vague, and it is cool to demonstrate that one cannot be bothered to be precise (cf. Hasund forthcoming). Although it is clear that ‘to be vague’ does not only involve using vague words, we have focused on the word level in the COLT conversations, i.e. vague words and vague expressions, leaving out vagueness by implicature. 4.3.2 Vague words in COLT Since Channell (1994) is the only systematic account of vagueness in conversation, we have largely been relying on this account. Table 4.14 includes all the expressions that Channell regards as vague and compares the frequency of these expressions in the teenage and adult (the 30+ age group) conversations in COLT. Since the comparison is based on very uneven figures — the total number of words produced by the teenagers is 349,281 and that of the adults 21,855, and the number of occurrences range from 811 to 1, the table displays occurrences per 10,000 words, with the absolute figures in parentheses. What the table tells us is that, if we adopt Channell’s list of vague expressions, the adult speakers use more vague language than the teenagers; the overall relative frequencies being 33.1 versus 10.3 tokens. Or whatever, for instance, is nine times as common in the adult speech, a lot (of), lots (of) and many/more/
Slanguage
Table 4.14.Relative occurrence of vague expressions in COLT per 10,000 words according to Channell’s (1994) list: teenagers and adults compared Vague expressions
Teenagers
Vague expressions
Adults
23.2 (811) thing(s), thingy, thingamajig etc. 17.2 (602) some 10.9 (379) about 7.4 (257) sort of 6.6 (232) or something (like that) 5.5 (192) many, more, most 3.8 (132) a bit (of) 3.6 (125) a lot (of) 2.9 (101) loads (of) 2.0 (71) and all 2.0 (70) sometimes 2.0 (69) and everything 1.8 (63) kind of 1.7 (60) and that (kind of thing/lot/stuff etc.) 1.6 (56) and stuff (like that) 1.3 (47) a few, fewer 1.2 (41) a couple 1.0 (36) lots (of) 1.0 (34) or anything 0.9 (32) n or m [ n, m = numerals] 0.7 (23) a load (of) 0.6 (22) at least 0.6 (22) or whatever 0.5 (19) for ages 0.5 (17) often 0.3 (12) over 0.3 (12) millions, billions, trillions 0.2 (7) around/round 0.2 (6) under whatsisname, whatnot, whatever, whatsit 0.2 (6) 0.2 (6) type of 0.1 (3) thousands 0.1 (3) and so on 0.1 (3) or somewhere like that 0.1 (2) hundreds 0.1 (2) several 0.1 (2) occasionally 0.1 (2) and them 0.1 (2) plenty (of) 0.03 (1) at most 0.03 (1) n or so [ n = numeral] 0.03 (1) or somebody 0.03 (1) or anybody 0.03 (1) or wherever 0.03 (1) the whole lot 0.03 (1) and crap 0 or what have you 0 or whoever 0 and so forth 0 and junk like this 0 or a whole range of things
thing(s), thingy, thingamajig etc. some about sort of or something (like that) many, more, most a bit (of) a lot (of) loads (of) and all sometimes and everything kind of and that (kind of thing/lot/stuff etc.) and stuff (like that) a few, fewer a couple lots (of) or anything n or m [ n, m = numerals] a load (of) at least or whatever for ages often over millions, billions, trillions around/round under whatsisname, whatnot, whatever,whatsit type of thousands and so on or somewhere like that hundreds several occasionally and them plenty (of) at most n or so [ n = numeral] or somebody or anybody or wherever the whole lot and crap or what have you or whoever and so forth and junk like this or a whole range of things
80.1 (175) 74.6 (163) 25.2 (55) 17.9 (39) 9.2 (20) 25.2 (55) 11.9 (26) 18.3 (40) 1.8 (4) 2.3 (5) 4.6 (10) 3.7 (8) 1.4 (3) 4.6 (10) 0.5 (1) 6.9 (15) 3.7 (8) 5.0 (11) 2.3 (5) 5.5 (12) 0 1.4 (3) 5.5 (12) 0 2.3 (5) 0.5 (1) 1.4 (3) 0.5 (1) 0 0.9 (2) 0 0 3.7 (8) 0 0.9 (2) 2.7 (5) 0 0 3.7 (8) 0 0.9 (2) 0.9 (2) 0.5 (1) 0.5 (1) 0 0 0.5 (1) 0.5 (1) 0.5 (1) 0 0
Total Relative frequency
Total Relative frequency
(724) 33.1
(3588) 10.3
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Trends in Teenage Talk
most are about five times as common, some is more than four times as common, thing(s) etc. is almost four times as common, and about and sort of are used more than twice as often by the adults. The only expressions that the teenagers use slightly more often than the adults are loads of, kind of, and and stuff like that. Some expressions occur only in the teenagers’ talk: a load of and crap and junk like this at most for ages occasionally or somewhere like that or a whole range of things the whole lot thousands type of under and them By contrast, only three of the expressions occur only in the adult speech, notably or what have you, or whoever and and so forth. Even if this points to a larger variety of vague expressions in the teenagers’ talk, the question that remains to be answered is why the relative numbers are so much higher in the talk of the adults. Is the language of teenagers really less vague than that of adults? Or is it rather that vagueness is realized differently in teenage talk than in adult talk, and that Channell’s list, which Table 4.14 is based upon, is largely modelled on adult language? Notice, for instance, that the discourse marker like, which abounds in teenage talk, is not included among Channell’s vague expressions. Channell makes clear that she does not include hedges (or ‘shields’), i.e. expressions that ‘introduce fuzziness with respect to the speaker’s commitment to the truth of the proposition being conveyed’ (1994: 16), such as I think, it seems that, and so on. The omission of like, then, may either reflect that she places like in the category of hedges,7 or it may simply reflect the fact that her data does not
7.The different functions and uses of like are developed in detail in Andersen (2001).
Slanguage
comprise teenage talk.8 Andersen (2001: 288), which is based on COLT, reveals that the use of like as a marker correlates with the speakers’ age and that ‘[t]he frequency of use seems to drop dramatically after age 20’. In the speech of 17–19 year-olds, like occurs at a rate of 61 per thousand words, to be compared with adults over age 30, where the occurrence is only 0.35 per thousand words. Nor does Channell include certain adverbs of frequency, notably always and never, which she considers to be ‘precise’ rather than ‘vague’ (1994: 116) in contrast to exact numbers, which she says may be used for exaggeration. One of her examples is ‘A million students came to see me today.’ (1994: 89). In COLT we find that always and never, too, are often used for exaggeration, for instance reflecting the speaker’s irritation or annoyance, as in (97) and (98): (97) I mean, you know, whenever you have you ever known someone to get constipated from Chinese, you know, but it always happens at the Indian, always, always! I mean it’s just disgusting! (132802: 126)
If Susie were right in saying that customers at Indian restaurants always get constipated, Indian restaurants would hardly get any customers at all. (98) Mandy: Cindy: Mandy: Cindy: Mandy:
She is strange. And she always sort of bitches on about everybody. She always what? Bitches on at everybody and about everybody. Yeah I know she, she’s never got anything nice to say, she’s always complains. Cindy: Except Pieter and & unclear; Mandy: She said she’s always complaining and criticising ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ it’s quite funny though but there you go. Bonie: Yeah. (133901: 54)
The girl that Mandy and Cindy are talking about is obviously someone they dislike because she has a tendency to criticize people. However, what they express by saying that she always sort of bitches on about everybody, that she’s never got anything nice to say and that she’s always complains is rather a reflection of
8.Channell’s spoken data include author’s corpus, examples from Marion Owen’s corpus, examples from the Birmingham Collection of English Text, examples from the Oxford Corpus of the English Langauge, and invented examples (cf. Channell 1994: xix).
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personal opinions than a statement of fact. In other word, always and never are hardly used in a precise and objective sense and could well be classified as vague expressions in these and similar cases. A third likely reason why the adult speakers in COLT use more vague language than the teenagers may be that they mainly appear in the role of parents and teachers. They are often recorded helping their children with the homework or explaining things during classroom lessons. In this instructive role, we see that the adults often accommodate their talk by using vague words instead of precise terminology; thus, the adults’ frequent use of vague language may have a pedagogical explanation. If this is the case, the results would probably be different if the adult speakers had been recorded in informal conversations with their friends. 4.3.2.1Vague words in relation to gender and school borough In this section we compare the rank order of the top ten vague expressions in relation to gender and school borough. Unfortunately, practical reasons prevented us from simultaneously controlling the age variable, but we know from reading and listening to the conversations that most of the speakers are teenagers. Channell (1994) reports that her respondents thought that women use more vague expressions than men do. Since she did not control for this variable, she could not confirm their opinion, but suggests reasons which might support it, for instance, with reference to Coates & Cameron (1988), that ‘vague language may be an exponent of power relations’ and that ‘women have their own language varieties for speaking about matters of concern to women’, which according to Carter (1980: 232) ‘incorporate a ‘high degree of unspecificity’ ‘(1994: 193). The difference between male and female speakers in COLT are displayed in Table 4.15, which lists the top ten vague expressions for each gender (for the total number of words per gender, see Table 4.3). Only very modest differences appear. Eight of the ten items are the same in both rank lists, though partly in a different order. The words that do not appear in both lists are loads of and and all, which occur only in the male list, and and everything and sometime, which occur only in the female list. But, contrary to what might have been expected, the relative frequency figures indicate that, if only the vague expressions listed in Table 4.14 are included, the boys use more of them than the girls. By contrast, if we had included vague items that are not included in Channell’s list, notably like, in particular, but also instances of always and never, we would find that like predominates in the girls’ conversations (cf. Andersen 2000). Extract (99) is a good example:
Slanguage
Table 4.15.Vague expressions and speaker gender per 10,000 words Vague expression
Male
Vague expression
Female
thing(s), thingy, thingamajig etc. some about many, more, most sort of or something (like that) a bit (of) a lot (of) loads (of) and all
22.6 (489) 19.1 (414) 12.9 (280) 7.5 (163) 6.4 (139) 4.3 (93) 3.9 (84) 3.8 (82) 2.9 (62) 2.5 (55)
thing(s), thingy, thingamajig etc. some sort of or something (like that) about many, more, most a lot (of) a bit (of) and everything sometimes
23.9 (479) 17.3 (347) 7.8 (157) 7.7 (154) 7.4 (148) 4.2 (84) 4.0 (81) 3.4 (69) 2.8 (56) 2.4 (49)
Total Relative frequency
(1861) 8.6
Total Relative frequency
(1624) 8.1
(99) Susie:
How long are we gonna be at West Side Story because like I wanna go home and like Kathy: Yeah I know, don’t you think it’s out of order right that we er that we erm cos he said it’s only gonna be on Thursdays right and sometimes Tuesdays and it’s every fucking week. Susie: I know and like …on Friday yeah I mean we’re gonna be there for about an hour and a half probably yeah, and I wanna go home and I wanna drop my bag off and I wanna change my clothes and that’s gonna be like seven o’clock or eight o’clock like cos I wanna come round to band practice tomorrow …and I won’t get there until bloody eight o’clock and miss half my bloody weekend.
(133701: 275–277)
The boys use always slightly more often than the girls, who, on the other hand, use never twice as often as the boys. Since we have not studied always and never for vagueness in any detail, we can only point to cases where they do express vagueness, as was illustrated in extracts (97) and (98). Table 4.16 shows the top ten vague words according to school borough. As the overall numbers are relatively low in the corpus, we have chosen to compare only the two school boroughs of Hertfordshire and Hackney, as they can be said to represent two different ends of a scale with respect to social background. In Hertfordshire, we meet (upper) middle class teenagers, in Hackney mostly working class teenagers. Also, these two boroughs are fairly similar with respect
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to the total number of words recorded: 123,392 in Hackney and 129,588 in Hertfordshire (the other boroughs have between 30,000–80,000 words each) Table 4.16.Vague expressions and school borough per 10,000 words Vague expression
Hackney
Vague expression
Hertfordshire
thing(s), thingy, thingamajig etc. some about sort of or something (like that) a bit (of) many, more most a lot (of) sometimes and everything
21.6 (266) 19.2 (237) 11.2 (138) 11.2 (138) 5.5 (68) 4.9 (61) 4.2 (52) 4.1 (51) 2.4 (30) 2.3 (28)
thing(s), thingy, thingamajig etc. some about or something (like that) sort of many, more most loads (of) a bit (of) a lot (of) sometimes
23.9 (309) 18.2 (236) 12.4 (161) 7.5 (97) 7.4 (96) 6.2 (80) 4.4 (57) 4.2 (55) 3.3 (43) 1.6 (21)
Total Relative frequency
(1069) 8.7
Relative frequency
(1155) 8.9
As the table shows, the difference in social background does not seem to affect the teenagers’ use of the top ten vague expressions, either in terms of rank order, which varies very little, or expressions used — only and everything is missing in the Hertfordshire list and only loads of in the Hackney list. 4.3.3 Placeholders 4.3.3.1General ‘Placeholders’ are defined as expressions ‘used when people cannot remember the name of a person or thing’, i.e. dummy nouns which can stand for item names, or for names of persons by Channell (1994: 157, 164). Such words have little or no semantic meaning and should rather be interpreted pragmatically. The placeholder words that Channell discusses, in line with Crystal & Davy (1975), are thingy, thingummy (with the variants thingummyjig and thingummybob), whatsisname, whatnot, whosit and whatsit. These are also the placeholder words we will concentrate on in this section. Incidentally, they are all defined as slang in Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang (2000). One reason why a speaker uses a placeholder, Channell argues, is that s/he does not know a name or noun or has forgotten it, another that s/he does not
Slanguage
want to use it. In the latter case, Channell mentions the following ‘further effects’ (1994: 162): a. b. c. d.
avoidance of offensive or taboo words being derogatory avoiding being pretentious avoiding pronunciation problems
In the following, we will try to show to what extent the COLT teenagers’ use of placeholders matches that of the speakers in Channell’s material. 4.3.3.2Placeholders in COLT With the exception of thing(s) and thingie/thingy, placeholder words are extremely rare in COLT. The distribution is as shown in Table 4.17: Table 4.17.Placeholder words in COLT Placeholder
Occurrences
thing(s) thingy whatsit thingamajig thingummybob thingybob whatsisname
952 39 4 3 1 1 1
Total
1001
Not all instances of the word thing(s) fulfil the placeholder function; there are numerous instances where the meaning of thing(s) is exactly ‘thing(s)’. Compare the following: (100) Dawn:
Courtneyde. Take that thing out your mouth
(135202: 18)
(101) Chelsea:
Let’s have a look at that Mr Bond thing.
(136403: 83)
(102) Agathon:
And one thing led to another.
(135906: 1)
(103) Callum: (138301: 20)
bitching me about every little fucking thing that I do.
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Trends in Teenage Talk
(104) Hannah:
But I did a sort of moody sort of thing
(142703: 13)
In our opinion, only thing in (101) and thing in (104) are placeholders according to the definition, but since we have not analysed thing(s) in any detail, we will leave the discussion at this point. The 39 instances of thingy/thingie are used for either an object or a person, as in (105) and (106) below: (105) Jack: Elliot: Jack: Elliot:
How do you reckon you did in that French thingie today? Crap. It was quite difficult actually wunnit? Mm.
(141906: 27–30)
Considering that Jack and Elliot’s dialogue takes place in a school study, the placeholder thingie is apparently related to school work, most likely a written test. The situation where the next dialogue occurs reveals that Fanny does not know the name of the boy who was laughing with Achil and uses thingie as a placeholder: (106) Fanny: and I walked off and like I just walked away and Achil and thingy were laughing at, you know, just not at me at how how crap [·nameÒ] Kate: [Yeah.] Fanny: had been and how I had to go away (142304: 213–215)
Thingamajig occurs four times with reference to an object and twice with reference to a person. In (107) we meet 14-year old Carola and Semantha and from Hackney: (107) Carola: Can I borrow your thingamajig? Semantha: I don’t know what thingamajig it is. (140708: 34)
Semantha’s reaction shows that there is no doubt that thingamajig belongs to the category of vague words. It obviously refers to an object that Carola would like to borrow, but Semantha has apparently no idea of what she is referring to. She might of course repeat the word just for the fun of it. Or is she ironical? Mandy uses thingamajig as a placeholder for the name of a person: (108) No but of course Pierre and Dylan ma= erm and thingamajig find it incredibly funny because they’re incredibly thick and they have no sense
Slanguage
of humour at all. (133905: 41)
The fact that thingamajig is preceded by disrupted speech and hesitation in the form of a voiced pause clearly indicates that Mandy cannot think of the name of the person. Another, similar, example is (109), where Agathon uses the placeholder in combination with the discourse marker you know and a silent pause on either side to gain time: (109) because you know. whatshisname. Simon (132602: 190)
Thingummybob, which is interchangeable with thingamajig, is used only once, but it is not entirely clear whether it refers to an object or a place. 18-year old Silvia from Hackney has been out shopping and is telling a friend where she has been and what she has bought: (110) I bought it down er, this thingummybob int it? This erm, five ninety nine, this eight ninety nine and I bought in Bootleggers, wasn’t it (134901: 29)
Thingybob, too, is used only once, here with clear reference to a place. Regina is quoting one of her friends: (111) So how are you getting to thingybob? (139609: 137)
Three of the four instances of whatsit are used as a noun, as in (112), while the fourth occurrence represents an unorthodox way of spelling what’s it, as in (113): (112) The guy’s a, he’s probably like, like a whatsit or something. (139501: 15)
(113) Er it’s, whatsit some, it’s some Nor= Norwegian thing. (139501:15)
4.3.3.3Placeholders in relation to gender and school borough Despite the very low frequencies for other placeholder words than thing(s) and thingy/thingie, let us have a look at the distribution in relation to gender and school borough. Due to the low overall numbers, plus the difference in type of talk recorded by the teenagers and adults mentioned in Section 4.3.2 (Vague words in COLT), we have decided not to investigate any further the age variable in the following sections.
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Trends in Teenage Talk
Table 4.18 shows the distribution of the placeholder words in relation to gender: Table 4.18.Placeholders and speaker gender per 10,000 words Placeholder
Male
Female
thing* whatsisname, whatever, whatsit
22.6 (489) 0.3 (6)
23.9 (479) 0.1 (2)
Total Relative frequency
495 2.3
481 2.4
*The frequency for thing includes thingy/thingie, thingamajig, thingummybob and thingybob.
As the table shows, there is practically no difference between the genders when it comes to the most common placeholders. Table 4.19 illustrates the distribution with respect to school borough. Again, we have selected the two boroughs of Hackney and Hertfordshire as reference points, as the overall numbers in the corpus are fairly low. Table 4.19.Placeholders and school borough per 10,000 words Placeholder
Hackney
Hertfordshire
thing* whatsisname, whatever, whatsit
21.6 (266) 0.2 (2)
23.9 (309) 0.2 (2)
Total Relative frequency
268 2.2
311 2.4
*The frequency for thing includes thingy/thingie, thingamajig, thingummybob and thingybob.
As was the case with gender, our brief survey has shown that the difference in the use of placeholders with reference to school background (including social class) is negligible. Again, the occurrences are too few to permit any generalizations whatsoever. 4.3.4 Set markers 4.3.4.1General The term ‘set marker’, or ‘setmarking tag’ is used by Dines (1980) for expressions ‘marking the preceding element as a member of a set’ (1980: 23). The function of such items, she says, is to ‘cue the listener to interpret the preceding
Slanguage
element as an illustrative example of some more general case.’ (1980: 22). Dines gives the following example as an illustration, where she argues that party stands for a particular class of occasions: (114) B: Does your husband drink much? A: Not much. He’ll have a drink at a party an’ that
The implication is that A’s husband is just a social, or occasional, drinker. An example from COLT is this extract from Tommy’s conversation with his sister Regina about the project (cf. example 96): (115) Tommy:
Regina: Tommy: Regina: Tommy:
Right in school yeah, er, after, they gave us these yeah, and they like wanna see like how we talk and all that, [you know] [Yeah] rastafarian style and all [unclear] [Who wants to who] wants to see how you talk? Er it’s, whatsit some, it’s some Nor= Norwegian thing
(139501: 11–15)
Following Dines, how we talk would then refer not just to talk but general teenage interactive behaviour, and rastafarian style could be understood as subgroup style in general. Channell prefers the term ‘vague category identifiers’, which she describes as consisting of ‘examplar + tag’ (bread or something). Such tags, she says, designate concrete or abstract categories by conjunction or disjunction, and in order to identify the intended category, the addressee will have to draw on pragmatic information (cf. 1994: 143). Biber et al. (1999: 115) use the term ‘coordination tags’, which they describe somewhat cryptically as connected elements with ‘the same relationship to surrounding structures.’. Finally, in a recent article, Overstreet & Yule propose the label ‘general extender’, arguing that the clause-final expressions in question ‘all have nonspecific, or ‘general’ reference and they “extend’ otherwise grammatically complete utterances’ (1997: 3). See also Aijmer (1985) and Oversheet (1999). Examples of vague category identifiers, general extenders, coordination tags, or set markers, which is the term that we prefer,9 are and all, and crap, and stuff like that, or something, or whatever, i.e. expressions which largely
9.Other terms used are e.g. ‘automatisms’ (Brotherton 1976), ‘generalized list completors’ (Jefferson 1990), ‘tags’ (Ward & Birner 1992), ‘extension particles’ (DuBois 1993).
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100 Trends in Teenage Talk
correspond to the formula and/or [pro-form] (like that) (cf. Dines 1980: 18). Biber et al. (1999: 115) suggest that such expressions ‘are best regarded as some kind of vagueness markers or hedges’, and that ‘they fit in with the communicative purposes of conversation, emphasizing the interpersonal involvement rather than complete explicitness.’ (1999:116). Overstreet & Yule (1997) see them as ‘indicators of intersubjectivity’, which serve to maintain social relationships on the basis of shared knowledge. Expressions such as and stuff or and things like that, they say, are particularly common in conversations between close personal friends, where they implicitly communicate that there is no need to be more explicit, since they both know what is referred to. In the next section, we will demonstrate how set markers are used in the COLT conversations. 4.3.4.2Set markers in COLT In order to see whether the points just made match the use of set markers in COLT, let us consider (116), where 14-year-old Alphie and Tony from Barnet, who are tired of school, are talking about ‘bunking off’ and about ‘this woman’, a lady from the council, who had visited both of them to find out why they did not go to school: (116) Tony: Did she go to you I’m on your side? [Shit like that] Alphie: [Well she she tried to] act like really friendly like. Tony: Yeah I know. Alphie: She really cares about me. Is that [er] Tony: [And she] said er, did she go to your mum, oh you’ve done a good job and, ·nvÒlaugh·/Ò [and shit and stuff. I hated it] Alphie: [No my mum wasn’t there.] She came like er lunch yeah? Tony: Yeah. Alphie: And after I’d gone home yeah? And she knocked on the door, had this crap conversation and, then buggered off. It was eh my mum wasn’t there. ·mimickingÒShe’s bad eerh!·/Ò Nothing I said you know. Tony: They think they can like, mum’s going on no that’s social services, why are you doing this and all that, so we’re having days off d’ya know what I mean? It’s no big deal is it? I mean they just just check on your attendance, same little shit about anyone.
Slanguage
Alphie: I don’t tell her I was home f= middle of Mondays as well. And my mum started, said there’s a problem like, I’m getting bullied or something. (140504: 205–214)
Alphie and Tony are close friends, they go to the same school, they have both cut class several times, and they have both been interrogated by ‘this woman’ (cf. 31.10). In other words, explicitness would be superfluous and would rather hinder than contribute to interpersonal involvement. The extract is an excellent example of the role of set markers as indicators of intersubjectivity. The hedging function is illustrated in (117), where Magigie is involved in a discussion about India and spiritualism with her brother and mother, who is a teacher: (117) I don’t know, he just said there are people there. I think he means people who are regarded by others as sort of experts and psychics and wise men and things like that. ·unclearÒ how they work, don’t ask me. It’s like they have feelers which intuit thing about other people there’s no, I mean how they do it goodness only knows (1387201: 207)
It is fairly obvious that Maggie is not really certain of what she is talking about. By using the set marker and things like that, which refers to a set of people represented by experts and psychics and wise men, she can avoid being explicit, hoping that the audience will be able to guess, roughly, what she is aiming at. Set markers can have various syntactic structures in their scope. It can be a clause, as illustrated in (118) and (119): (118) Oh yeah I would if I knew him and that. (142602: 446)
(119) Yeah, we gotta tape, you just do your conversations and that (134901: 190)
or a verb, as in (120): (120) They just dance and that. (135205: 24)
or a phrase, as in (121): (121) I mean she’s really toned and that (142602: 346)
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102 Trends in Teenage Talk
And that is sometimes used to refer to people: (122) Where did Chantel and that go? (134803: 1)
But people are more often referred to by and that lot: (123) Mandy: What pissed me off is, is he’s hanging about with Pierre and that lot now right, but when you talk about Pierre and that lot to him its, oh they’re a bunch of chiefs. Allie: Is it ·unclearÒ Mandy: Don’t, no don’t say anything because he comes back to me, it comes back onto me, It don’t matter whether you say I won’t say anything cos it always comes back. But he thinks Mandy and that lot are going to ·unclearÒ he thinks Mandy’s a slag and everything, yet he’s still hanging about with all you lot. (132901: 12–13)
Channell claims that and that is ‘marked sociolinguistically’ (1994: 120). This claim is only confirmed by the present data, if we include and that lot, which was found to be most frequently used by the working class teenagers. 4.3.4.3Set markers in relation to gender and school borough On the basis of corpus data, Biber et al. (1999: 116) found that the most common set markers (or coordination tags) in conversation had the following frequencies per million words: or something four hundred times, and everything one hundred and fifty times, and things (like that) one hundred times, and and stuff (like that) fifty times. Or something is also by far the most frequent set marker in the COLT corpus; it constitutes 40 per cent of the total occurrence of set markers. Table 4.20 shows the distribution of the most common set markers found in COLT according to speaker gender. Although the female speakers use set markers somewhat more frequently than the male speakers, again we must conclude that the overall gender difference is marginal. Table 4.21 shows the distribution of set markers according to school boroughs, Hackney and Hertfordshire compared. Judging by the relative frequencies, the difference in the use of set markers among speakers from the two school boroughs is marginal indeed. The absolute figures are low, or very low, however, and a larger amount of data, which requires a much larger corpus, might have given a different result.
Slanguage 103
Table 4.20.Set markers and speaker gender per 10,000 words Set marker
Male
Female
and all (…) and everything and that (stuff/lot etc.) and stuff (like that) and things (like that) and shit (like that) and them and crap or something (like that) or anything or whatever or what have you or somewhere like that or somebody or anybody or whoever or wherever
2.5 (55) 1.0 (21) 1.3 (29) 1.4 (30) 18 6 0.05 (1) 0.05 (1) 4.3 (93) 1.0 (21) 0.8 (18)
1.0 (20) 2.8 (56) 1.9 (38) 1.4 (28) 5 2 0.05 (1)
0.05 (1) 0.05 (1)
0.05 (1)
Total Relative frequency
298 1.4
344 1.7
7.7 (154) 0.8 (17) 0.8 (16) 0.05 (1)
0.1 (3) 0.1 (3) 0.1 (2)
And all is of particular interest because of its many collocations, although most of them occurred only once in COLT: and all that 29 and all 19 and all this 6 and all that lot 6 and all that stuff 2 and all sorts of other shit 2 and all that lot and what not ever 1 and all that crap 1 and all that sort of crap 1 and all that sort of shit 1 and all sorts 1 and all sorts of things 1 and all this shit 1 and all this bullshit 1 and all this crap
104 Trends in Teenage Talk
and all this lot 1 and all this sort of nonsense 1 and all these things 1 and all those 1 The longest combination of set markers is produced by 13-year old Callum from Camden, who is talking to himself in class: (124) See I’m so petite and perfect and all that lot and what not ever (139701: 116)
Another, somewhat confusing, example is (125): (125) Yes, he’s gon=, told you, yeah the guy’s a, he’s probably like, like a whatsit or something. (134602: 806)
The question is what ‘set’ is involved, and whether shared knowledge can help in this case. (More about set markers in COLT and the BNC in Holdorff (2002))
Table 4.21.Set markers and school borough per 10,000 words Set marker
Hackney
Hertfordshire
Total
and all (…) and everything and that (stuff/lot etc.) and stuff (like that) and things (like that) and shit (like that) and them and crap or something (like that) or anything or whatever or what have you or somewhere like that or somebody or anybody or whoever or wherever
(1.3 (16) (2.3 (28) (1.8 (22) (1.5 (18) (8) (2 (0.1 (1)
(1.2 (15) (1.5 (19) (1.2 (16) (1.2 (16) (6) (4
(5.5 (68) (0.7 (9) (0.6 (8)
(7.5 (97) (1.2 (16) (0.9 (12)
78 77 70 59 23 8 2 1 254 39 36 1 3 3 2 1 2
Total Relative frequency
181 1.5
(0.2 (2) (0.1 (1) (0.1 (1) (0.1 (1) 205 1.6
659
Slanguage 105
4.4 Summing up In this chapter we have discussed slang, swearing and vague language as part of a larger framework referred to as slanguage, with the motivation that they all belong to what can be characterized as slangy language. However, we have dealt with them in different sections to be able to describe how they are used in more detail. Slang was discussed in terms of ‘proper’ and ‘dirty’. As regards the proper slang words, it should be kept in mind that the COLT corpus dates from 1993, which means that a lot of slang words that are used by today’s London teenagers had not yet appeared when the corpus was collected. The dirty slang words, we assume, are largely the same in the year 2002 as in 1993. All in all, the use of slang was found to culminate in the 17–19 age group, and proper slang was found to be more frequent than dirty slang. With respect to gender, the male speakers were found to use more slang totally speaking than the female, and also more dirty slang. Tower Hamlets, which is a working class area, turned out to be the school borough with more slang, relatively speaking, than in the other school boroughs investigated, and it is also the borough where most of the dirty slang was observed, while Hertfordshire, a middle class borough, is the borough with most proper slang. Due to the the near correspondence between school borough and social class belonging, a tentative suggestion is that the speakers with a class 2 and class 3 background use more slang and more dirty slang than the class 1 speakers, who, on the other hand use more proper slang than the other speakers. There is a lot of swearing in the COLT conversations. The boys dominate, totally speaking, and were also found to use stronger swearword than the girls, who much more often than the boys substitute a strong swearword with god. Swearing turned out to be most common among boys in the 10–13 age group and among the girls in the 17–19 age group, which includes many of the Hertforshire girls. Tower Hamlets is again the leading school borough. Here we found no ‘clear’ pattern with reference to social class. Interestingly enough, a comparison between COLT and the BNC showed that the top ten dirty words are uttered relatively more frequently by the adult speakers in the BNC than by the COLT teenagers. Vague expressions, too, turned out to be more frequent among the adults who took part in some of the COLT conversations. This, however, is probably an effect of the list of words investigated (cf. Channell 1994), which does not include some of the most frequent vague words in COLT, in particular the word like. It is also likely that type of talk has had an impact. There are a number of
106 Trends in Teenage Talk
classroom recordings where the adults in COLT appear in the role of teachers, instructing the students and accommodating their language by means of, among other things, vague expressions. The most interesting findings as regards the social distribution of vague expressions were related to gender and social background. Our study showed that, contrary to stereotypical assumptions, the use of vague langauge in COLT was remarkably evenly distributed across the two genders and the different school borouhgs. There were some modest differences for individual expressions; however, the overall conclusion is that the use of vague language in COLT cannot be associated with a specific ‘genderlect’ or ‘sociolect’.
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Chapter 5
Variation in the use of reported speech
She goes you’re too immature. I goes all right then. She goes you’d better go. I said yeah I will. And I walked out. And then she didn’t call me, and I didn’t call her and that was it. Simple as that. Cos my Mum wouldn’t let me call her. She goes ·mimickingÒyou’re not calling her up again. No way!·/Ò Susie, 14
In this chapter we investigate the range of linguistic items that teenagers have at their disposal when indicating that a part of an utterance contains reported speech. We will restrict the notion of reported speech to direct quotations (constructed dialogue), and hence disregard indirect speech (cf. ‘My mum said (that) I’m not calling her up again’), which is in fact much less common in the data at hand. The purpose of this chapter is, firstly, to present those markers that teenagers typically use for expressing that a segment of an utterance reports what was said on some occasion. The reason why this is relevant to the study of teenage language is that the range of markers is apparently wider than that of other age groups, and that the phenomenon of reporting speech itself seems a typical feature of the language of teenagers. It is a central feature of the so-called ‘high-involvement style’ (Tannen 1986, 1989; Nordberg 1987), which teenagers commonly apply, particularly when telling stories, such as Susie’s story above. Secondly, we are interested in finding out whether there are factors that govern teenagers’ choice of particular items in particular contexts. Why is it that Susie sometimes chooses go and other times say as a verb of saying? And what governs the variation between past and present tense? And why do we sometimes find the past or present progressive verb forms in reporting verbs? These are issues that are addressed in Sections 5.2–5.4. First, however, we give a survey of the different markers that are applied.
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5.1 Markers of reported speech The following examples give a non-exhaustive survey of the range of items that may be used to indicate a speech event. In the examples, markers of reported speech are indicated in boldface while reported segments are underlined. (126) I watched the first ten minutes which was really funny cos, as they’re going along in the truck, ah look at that woman! Ah! Yes! Oh what a lovely body! And, and he goes no we can’t, can we stop? Please! Please! Stop! Stop! Stop! And the guy driving the truck says no we can’t we’ve got an important meeting. Okay so the driver actually speeds up okay? And then another woman exactly the same clothes, same hat, so it looks like the same woman so he says, oh my God! There she is again! She’s, she’s got this fa=, how the hell did she get in front of us? Come on, please, the driver says I know, I know, speed up, let’s test her stamina. (132503: 413)
(127) she goes, she goes erm, ·mimicking a woman’s voiceÒso what does your daddy do for an occupation, baby?·/Ò And he goes erm, ·mimicking a stupid mans voiceÒ my dad’s a butcher.·/Ò She goes chung! Butcher knife, chop it off, put it on the shelf, the man’s dead. The next man goes up, ·mimicking a stupid man’s voiceÒhello.·/Ò She goes ·mimicking a woman’s voiceÒhello, cutey, wooty coochy coochy coochy bing! What does your daddy do?·/Ò ·mimicking a man’s voiceÒMy dad’s a mechanic.·/Ò ·nvÒimitates sound of something being unscrewed and popped off·/nvÒ. (132701: 152)
(128) and then, and then he came up to me and said erm, if you if you go and see ·nameÒ this afternoon erm he would like to speak to you, I was like, he should come and speak to me (142304/273)
(129) Cos first of all I didn’t wanna talk in it you know I just went sort of like yeah, yeah, yeah. Now it’s sort of like yes I wanna talk down it all the time, I want them to hear my voice! (13270723)
(130) But if I was to say it’s different. Like, Linsey goes to me, cos I’ve got a black kitten he goes, what are you gonna call it? I goes dunno. Goes call it Malcolm X. I goes shut up! He goes, call it, call it Ma= call it Martin X and then he says call it Nigger. I think Nigger’s a good name but, you know what I mean like, come here Nigger! But … it’s, it’s racist. (132901: 67)
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(131) If I had a gun here yeah and I knew you were coming at me coming at me like with a club and I shouted stop, and you carried on and I shot you dead I’d get away with that. (41405: 135)
The examples display great variation in terms of speech reporting strategies. Each type of use is discussed more fully in the sections that follow this brief survey. First of all, there is variation in the sense that reported speech may or may not be explicitly indicated. Simon’s utterance in (126) contains a series of speech reports, but the reported segments are commonly not explicitly indicated. In fact, not even a speaker shift requires any explicit marking. This is clear from the fact that the two consecutive segments no we can’t and can we stop? are uttered by two different characters in the story, without being separated by an explicit quotative marker. So the narrative shifts between two crucially different modes of speech in the narrative, event description versus ‘staging’ of reported speech acts, and only occasionally does the speaker indicate the onset of the reported segment by a reporting verb or other marker. Secondly, story-tellers may or may not colour the staged utterances by means of paralinguistic cues, including voice modulation, mimickry, gestures, hand movements, etc. In (127), the speaker underlines the different characteristics of the narrative persona by means of voice modulation, sometimes, but not always, in combination with explicit speaker attribution. These cues serve a dual function of marking a segment as a speech report as well as providing attitudinal or other information concerning the (ficticious) character in the story. Naturally, we shall have to restrict our focus to those aspects of paralinguistics that are observable in our data, namely the auditive ones, but it is no doubt that visual cues also commonly accompany utterances such as these. Thirdly, the speakers vary their choice between the use of a verb or other (explicit, lexical) quotative marker. A common and, by now, well-known marker of reported speech in adolescent English is the so-called ‘quotative complementiser’ be like, as shown in (128), but we also find like in combination with an explicit quotative verb, and simply like alone as a borderline marker between a description and a quotation, as seen in examples (129) and (130). Fourthly, speakers can, of course, vary their choice of verb when quoting. This is not to say that quotative verbs always convey the same meaning, nor that they are interchangeable in all contexts; both unspecific verbs such as go and say, and more specific ones such as shout occur; cf. (130)–(131). But, as we shall see, the former group vastly outnumbers the latter in everyday conversational narrative.
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And finally, as mentioned, speakers vary their choice of verb tense and aspect in narratives. Hence, there are at least five independent parameters that make the conversational narrative a field of great variation and versatility. In this chapter, we describe these characteristics in turn, paying particular attention to tense and aspectual variation and choice of verb, to see if social, semantic or pragmatic factors can be said to govern speakers’ choice of one verb form vis à vis another. A few general things about the nature of quotations should be pointed out before we proceed to the discussion of individual strategies. It is rarely the case in conversational narrative that the speaker reports dialogue exactly as originally presented, especially if tone of voice, paralinguistic cues, mimickry, etc. are taken into consideration. Hence, there is always an element of loose use or nonliteraleness involved in reported speech. This makes the term ‘reported speech‘ somewhat inappropriate (cf. Johnstone 1987; Yule & Mathis 1992). Tannen argues that, in conversation much of what takes the form of dialogue is by no means a ‘report’ of what others have said but constructions by speakers to frame information in an effective and involving way. (1989: 118)
As exact fidelity is rarely a virtue in reported speech, Tannen (1986, 1989) and others prefer the term ‘constructed dialogue’. Hence, he should come and speak to me in (128) above, for instance, can be construed as a more or less faithful rendering of some previous utterance, but it is hardly verbatim. Importantly, quotations are attributive and meta-representational. That is to say, rather than ‘saying’ something, a speaker is ‘interpreting’ what someone else said. (On the use/mention disctinction and descriptive vs. interpretive use of language, cf. Wilson & Sperber 1988.) Moreover, markers of reported speech can be said to have a dual function of indicating non-incorporation of a quoted segment (a subjective function) and serving as a demarcation marker, indicating the onset of a reported segment (a textual function). The notion of the speaker’s nonincorporation, or quotative distance, is a crucial one, and is further discussed in the next section.
5.2 Mimickry and zero-quotations As a rule, reported speech is part of a narrative, but this is not always the case. Equally common is the use of so-called zero-quotatives, where ‘the direct
Variation in the use of reported speech
speech forms are presented, not as reports (or even pseudo-reports) of what was said, but as indications of speakers’ attitude that are echoed by another speaker’ (Mathis & Yule 1994: 63). Zero-quotatives are exemplified in (132)–(135): (132) He’s gonna storm out of there, mimicking you bastard Simon! You bastard!·/Ò What, mimicking You bastard Simon! You bastard!·/Ò (132503: 180)
(133) ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ mimicking American accent That’s a likely possibility·/Ò. Actually Muhammad I don’t reckon we should go this way. (132503: 451)
(134) Lesley man calm down get your top out of her bra, hand out of her, mimicking West Indian accent let go of her coconuts!·/Ò. (132606: 18)
(135) So what? … mimicking Please don’t beat me dad·/Ò Only joking. ·nvÒgiggle·/nvÒ (137701: 220)
It is clear that an utterance such as Simon’s (132) fits well with Mathis & Yule’s description of zero-quotatives; the segment You bastard Simon clearly represents the words of the character in the story, and there is no explicit quotative marker other than a slight voice modification, indicated by the ·mimickingÒ tag. As mentioned in Chapter 3 and elsewhere, teenage talk contains a great amount of verbal humour and mimickry, and the speakers clearly enjoy conversationally ‘mucking about’. A speaker who utters sequences such as (133)–(135) may well be indicating that ‘this is not what I am saying right now, but this is something some people tend to say, and I am ridiculing/quoting/interpreting people who tend to talk in this way’. For instance, Simon’s utterance in (133), where he is mimicking American accent, apparently out of the blue, has clearly a ‘quotational feel’ to it, even though it is not attributed to a particular narrative persona. Moreover, teenagers’ common tendency to ‘take the mickey’ out of their friends in a cheerful manner involve the common use of mock-utterances such as (134)–(135). However, it seems from the context that this is not something the speaker is saying, or vouching for, but she is merely ‘reporting’ something that somebody else might say at some point without attributing it to a particular person. It is not at all futile to consider the uses exemplified in (132)–(135) also as a type of quotation without an explicit attribution to a specific speaker, along with Mathis & Yule’s (1994) notion of zero-quotatives. Given the existence of zero-quotatives, it may sometimes be difficult to judge what is a quotation (thus widely defined) and what is not. After all, nothing
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formally distinguishes (132) from (135); rather, both seem to indicate the speaker’s non-incorporation of the segment that is the result of mimickry. Consequently, the distinction between speech reports and other material may be difficult to draw, as with many other aspects of conversation. In fact, the COLT corpus reveals great variability in the use of mimickry and zero-quotations. Table 5.1 gives a survey of the paralinguistic features that occur, and the list indicates the impressive variation and creativity that characterises this phenomenon in teenage talk.1 Hence, it is unproblematic to do without an explicit verb of saying or the like, in the context of conversational mimickry, and such verbs are not at all a prequisite for quotational use. Nevertheless, it is common that mimickry collocates with an explicit attribution, as this happens more often than not.
Table 5.1.Survey of mimickry tags in COLT (shortened) ·mimicking a man’s voiceÒ ·mimicking a sexy woman’s voiceÒ ·mimicking a woman’s voiceÒ ·mimicking African accentÒ ·mimicking American accentÒ ·mimicking baby’s voiceÒ ·mimicking Cockney accentÒ ·mimicking dark voice from chewing gum adÒ ·mimicking foreign (Pakistani?) accentÒ ·mimicking German accentÒ ·mimicking her sister’s accentÒ ·mimicking Jamaican accentÒ ·mimicking lispÒ ·mimicking male voiceÒ ·mimicking Mr Bean’s voiceÒ ·mimicking Northern accentÒ ·mimicking Pakistani accentÒ ·mimicking refined accentÒ ·mimicking Scottish accentÒ ·mimicking stupid personÒ ·mimicking Swedish accentÒ ·mimicking teacher’s voiceÒ ·mimicking West Indian accentÒ ·mimicking woman’s voiceÒ
·mimicking a monkeyÒ ·mimicking a stupid man’s voiceÒ ·mimicking a yobbo hooliganÒ ·mimicking American accent from Wayne’s WorldÒ ·mimicking baby voiceÒ ·mimicking Chinese accentÒ ·mimicking cryingÒ ·mimicking drunken voiceÒ ·mimicking foreign accentÒ ·mimicking girlie voiceÒ ·mimicking Indian accentÒ ·mimicking SusieÒ ·mimicking Liverpudlian accentÒ ·mimicking mentally handicappedÒ ·mimicking nasal speechÒ ·mimicking old woman’s voiceÒ ·mimicking posh accentÒ ·mimicking Romanian accentÒ ·mimicking speaker 15’s voiceÒ ·mimicking stutterÒ ·mimicking Swedish chef from Muppet ShowÒ ·mimicking upper class personÒ ·mimicking witch voiceÒ ·mimicking Yorkshire accentÒ
1.This is in fact a shortened version of a more complete list that can be found in the COLT User’s Manual (cf. Stenström et al. 1998). Equally long and varied is the survey of non-verbal sounds in COLT (ibid).
Variation in the use of reported speech
Table 5.2.Distribution of mimickry across COLT age groups Age
n
per 1000 words
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
9 70 156 64 119 9 8 3
0.86 0.84 1.68 0.92 1.53 0.47 0.70 0.49
1.8 1.6 1.4 1.2 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Figure 5.1.Distribution of mimickry across age groups
In this connection a pertinent question is whether zero-quotations and mimickry are confined to a particular speaker group in COLT. As a null hypothesis, one would assume that young speakers apply it more, given that mimickry is common also in young children’s language, but not in adult language. As regards gender differences, we have no presumption concerning the variation but expect the distribution to be equal. In the following statistics, we include all types of mimickry, regardless of whether or not it co-occurs with an explicit marker of reported speech. As regards the different age groups, the distribution is as shown in Table 5.2 and Figure 5.1.
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Table 5.3.Distribution of mimickry across the genders Gender
n
per 1000 words
female male
199 274
0.93 1.19
Although there is some fluctuation in the early adolescent years, the figure steadily drops towards the end of the teenage years. There is a peak at age 14, while the over-16 groups all have a relative frequency round 0.5 tokens per thousand words. Hence, it seems that mimickry is primarily a feature of early adolescence. As regards gender differences, the distribution is as shown in Table 5.3 and Figure 5.2. We note that mimickry is more a male than a female adolescent phenomenon. However, no systematic variation could be found as regards the other sociolinguistic parameters, social class or ethnicity.
1.40 1.20 1.00 0.80 0.60 0.40 0.20 0.00
female
Figure 5.2.Distribution of mimickry by gender
male
Variation in the use of reported speech
5.3 The quotative marker (be) like The grammaticalized construction be like, as shown in (136), is well known (cf. Romaine & Lange 1991; Andersen 1998, 2001; Tagliamonte & Hudson 1999; Hasund 2001), but it is not the only pattern where like introduces reported speech or thought. The following examples show that the teenagers have at their disposal a variety of constructions with like that may be used to frame quotative use of language: (136) and I’m like, and I’m like, scum! ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ (141707: 343)
(137) But if I was to say it, it’s different. Like, Linsey goes to me, cos I’ve got a black kitten he goes, what are you gonna call it? I goes dunno. Goes call it Malcolm X. I goes shut up! He goes, call it, call it Ma= call it Martin X and then he says and he goes call it Nigger. I think Nigger’s a good name but, you know what I mean like come here Nigger! But … it’s, it’s racist. (132901: 67)
(138) cos you’re so cool like ·mimickingÒnot worthy, we’re not worty to speak to Elliot·/Ò but you’re fucking sad! (141801: 132)
(139) everyone sits there going ooh ooh ooh·/Ò it’s like ·shoutingÒaaaaaah·/Ò ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ (132405: 14)
(140) but it seems like they’re, they’re, they don’t, they’re not interested in being friends with you er it’s just like I wanna fuck you I don’t wanna ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ I don’t even wanna talk to you (142305: 15)
(141) And then he goes like, sorry man, close the door and get out. (139003: 21)
(142) She slides down the banister and says like blurgh, la blah la blah loo! (135805: 87)
(143) We used to get told like, use six thousand or seven thousand or numbers like that (133203: 489)
It is not uncommon that like alone functions as a demarcation marker between a quotation and the rest of the utterance. This is illustrated by (137), where like marks off the segment come here Nigger as a quotation. This imperative is not
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preceded by an explicit verb of saying, but its interpretive status is actually underlined by a slight voice modulation (higher pitch), as if to suggest ‘this is the way one would speak to a cat’. As mentioned, this may co-occur with more clearcut mimickry, as in (138). Moreover, a variety of constructions consisting of it, a form of be and like, including it’s like, it’s sort of like, it’s just like and it was like, sometimes also have a quotation marking function, as illustrated in (139) and (140). We also note that like may also occur in connection with an explicit reporting verb, as in (141)–(143), where like intervenes between a quotative verb and its complement. In terms of grammatical status, structures of the type I went like and I was like differ, because in the former, like is a non-obligatory pragmatic marker, while in the latter, like is an obligatory component of the grammaticalised quotative complementiser. They differ in other terms, too, because the use of like without a quotative verb is very general in meaning. While say is restricted to reports of verbally expressed quotations, be like can take a much wider range of meta-representational uses in its scope. It may, for instance, correspond loosely to ‘this was the thought that struck me at that point’. For example, the ‘quotation’ in (136) above may represent cases of explicit mention, but could just as well be said to be a representation of something the speaker felt would be an appropriate utterance at that point. Consequently, paraphrases such as ‘I thought’, ‘I felt’, ‘I felt like saying’, etc. may sometimes be more appropriate than ‘I said’. In some cases it may be problematic to figure out whether a reported segment represents what someone said or thought. Generally, then, what the construction does is mark off the following linguistic material as a thought, an attitude or a feeling which is meta-represented, but which has not necessarily been explicitly uttered. In this sense, be like has very much in common with the zero-quotatives discussed above, and it seems to have an intermediate status between these and the quotative verbs. Sometimes, the construction be like seems to involve a meta-representation of a speaker attitude, but where the attitude remains unspecified or is vaguely indicated, rather than explicitly mentioned: (144) I am really into the football at the moment, re= I watched Marin= San Marino you had to see it it was such, it was such an embarrassment! …When San Marino scored in the first ten seconds it we all just sat there and we were like, … (141702: 3)
Variation in the use of reported speech
(145) Well what I tried last weekend, not quite crying but I did a sort of moody sort of thing, I di= I was really quiet and I just ignored everyone and I was like really like, you know, didn’t say a word. (142703: 13)
In (144), the utterance we all just sat there and we were like, …seems to provide an indication as to the reaction of the spectators of England’s soccer match against San Marino, for instance their surprise, frustration or anger at the fact that San Marino scored the first goal. It is highly likely that this use of be like is accompanied by a gesture or facial expression that makes the echo of the spectators’ attitude more conspicuous. Similarly, in (145), nothing is explicitly reported, but be like is used to introduce an unspecified feeling, a state of mind which is not representative of what the speaker feels at the moment of speaking, but one which occurred to her previously. In these cases, the be like construction seems to provide or accompany (vague) indications of previous speaker attitudes, and the hearer is invited to draw inferences as to the type of attitude involved. Since like can precede quotational use not only as part of the expression be like, but in several collocational patterns, it is of interest to find out to what extent the different structures are grammaticalized as devices for marking quotative use. This is shown in Table 5.4. As a matter of fact, the use of like accompanying quotations/interpretive use is vastly outnumbered by certain other marker uses of like (approximative, exemplificatory, metalinguistic, hesitational/linking), and it accounts for a mere seven per cent of the total occurrences of like as a marker. (The other functions are described in detail in Andersen 2001.) Moreover, the much-discussed grammaticalised quotative construction be like occurs no more than 34 times. This suggests that in COLT, being recorded in 1993, this expression has not been grammaticalized to the same extent as in American English; nor is it as Table 5.4.Distribution of subtypes of like in connection with quotational use Type of use
n
%
% of total
like only be like it’s like go like say like other verb + like
15 34 10 16 12 7
16.0 36.2 10.6 17.0 12.8 7.4
1.1 2.5 0.7 1.2 0.9 0.5
Σ
94
100.0
7.0
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prevalent as in Tagliamonte & Hudson‘s (1999) data from York, recorded in 1996. In their data, be like amounted to 18 per cent of all quotative verbs. In COLT, this construction is grossly outnumbered by the other quotative forms, and amounts to less than 0.5 per cent of all quotations found in the corpus. However, the actual collocation of be like is in fact far more common than Table 5.4 suggests, but in most cases it does not have a quotative function.
5.4 Reporting verbs: go vs. say Let us now turn to the more traditional ways of reporting speech. Verbs of saying are, of course, the most common and well-known type of quotative marker. One might think that the most traditional reporting verb, say, would be the most common verb, but this is not the case. Table 5.5 shows that say is second in terms of overall frequency, and its role as a general quotative marker is actually severely challenged by another verb, namely go. Table 5.5.Overall distribution of go versus say go quotations 152 percentage 7 overall freq 2104
goes
going went
GO
say
says
saying said
SAY
918 73 1249
222 16 1373
1395 27 5205
183 15 1198
82 33 251
60 19 323
748 25 2942
103 22 479
423 36 1170
go is used before direct quotations about twice as often as say. The most relevant figures here, namely those in the top row of the table, include only those tokens where the verbs are actually used to introduce direct speech, and we are generally ignoring the many other uses these verbs may have in this discussion (see below). The aim here is to explore what the two verbs have in common and how they differ, in terms of a number of grammatical, pragmatic and social features. If we compare the individual verb forms, we note that go does not come out as the most frequent verb in all categories. Among the most common quotative forms, the simple present tense, goes completely overrides says in terms of frequency; it is more than 11 times as frequent. This relation also characterises the progressive forms, since going occurs about four times as often as saying. On the other hand, the past tense form of say is more common than
Variation in the use of reported speech
that of go. These statistics are commented on further in Section 5.4.2, where we focus on variation in terms of tense and aspectual features. 5.4.1 Are go and say equivalent? Grammatical differences The use of go as a reporting verb has been recognised in some brief descriptions in the literature (Butters 1980, 1982), but to our knowledge, no in-depth study of this phenomenon has been carried out. Prescriptivists might claim that go should only be used with sounds, but numerous examples in COLT show that this is not a principle that teenagers adhere to. On the contrary, go is, by and large, replacing say in a variety of contexts. It can be used before renderings of verbal expressions as well as sounds:2 (146) He goes, nah mate! Ain’t you lot ever heard of tea bags? (132617: 101)
(147) A cockerel goes cock-a-doodle-do (132617: 131)
This distinguishes it from say, which always precedes a complement representing a verbal expression in our data. However, there appears to be certain restrictions on the use of go, and it is these we want to investigate in this section. From the outset, it should be pointed out that both words are fairly general in meaning, and can, of course, have a number of functions other than that of introducing direct speech. This includes metaphorical and metonymic uses, such as go apeshit, go mental and the use of say as an exemplifier, the grammatical function of semi-auxiliary going to, use in pragmatic markers like Go there! and I say!, etc. Moreover, both forms have some related uses that are nearquotations, but not reported speech: (148) You know you’re mum, she’s got a sign on her arse saying no entry. (135808: 69)
(149) It’s a really trebly track that goes ·singingÒnee nee nee na nee nee·/Ò and it’s really bloody annoying. (134103: 297)
These are not direct quotations in the sense we have in mind here, because the subject of the quotative verb does not refer to the person/animal/thing uttering
2.The issue of what follows the quotation is further adressed in Section 5.4.3.
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the quoted string; i.e. it does not have the semantic role of agent. Neither verb denotes an act of verbal/auditive expression in these contexts. Interestingly, the verbs go and say could not have been swapped, it seems. Only say can be used in the sense of ‘signifying’; cf. *a sign going no entry and *a really trebly track that says nee nee nee. This indicates that the verbs are not semantically equivalent before near-quotatives such as these. In addition to these differences, only say can mean ‘utter’ or ‘mention’, as in Well I said (*went) a rude word. Another important difference, of course, relates to the direct/indirect speech distinction. While say can be used for either purpose, go is restricted to direct speech introduction: (150) I could have murdered Ryan doing that! When Maureen goes to Ryan and Mau=, Ryan sa=, Maureen said that Ryan was sick, then after, when Ryan knew that he was sick he went, ooh mummy I’m gonna be sick … Maureen said he was sitting there eating and he went like this. Blurgh! Right on the floor just like that. (135207: 580–591)
This appears to be a categorical restriction on the use of go as a quotative marker and applies irrespective of whether a complementiser precedes the quotation; cf. *Maureen went that Ryan was sick and *Maureen went he was sitting there eating. We take this as a sign that quotative go is a fairly recent phenomenon and that it has not been fully grammaticalised as a quotative verb. Another related difference that may not be categorical is the fact that one-word complements tend to be introduced by say; cf. You said (*?went) Amy didn’t you?. However, we find that go, like say, can have an adverbial as a complement: (151) And I goes casually, do you like Bob Marley? No he’s a black nigger. What! Do you know what you’re saying? (132901: 70)
(152) Oi ask, say, just go to him er, just go to him you’re you’re so crap at French even Elliot can get ·unclearÒ (141906: 95)
(153) Then we told him. He goes to me, ·mimicking a boyish voiceÒDanielle I like your shoes·/Ò. I go I like your long greasy hair. His hair’s down to here now innit? (135304: 179)
This gives an indication of the extent to which go has been grammaticalized as a quotative verb.
Variation in the use of reported speech
5.4.2 Variation in tense, aspect and standardness By far, most quotations in the corpus appear in narratives. These are generally told in the past tense, but there are great differences with respect to the verb forms chosen to convey past time: (154) And he told me that he went up to Sean and he goes erm, and he says how’s everything going with Tiffany, and Sean goes yeah it’s good and and he go= erm cos er Phil erm tt cos Truax goes oh cos it’s it’s going really well with me and Rebecca it’s going really well, I’m really enjoying it, what about you you know and Sean goes yeah, it’s really good, and Truax goes erm you know is it is it a long term thing then, you looking for a long term thing do you think and Sean goes yeah, what about you and Truax goes yeah yeah definitely yeah you know cos he was doing it subtly so I came back and I said to Tess you know really, an= and Truax said there was nothing, strange about (…) And, Rox goes oh so are you a virgin then, erm erm, tt Pierre, and he goes no, and she was still going out with him and she knew that it wasn’t with her, obviously, and, and Ryan goes oh who was it then and he goes oh just two, two birds I met in erm, Portugal. (142604: 18–58)
(155) She reeled off I can’t remember, reeled off a load of blokes yes last night and I said are there any girls going, and he said well I’ll see if I can get Laura ·nameÒ and Giles to come and I said yeah I feel much better about that you know whatever and then today he said erm look, ·nameÒ can’t go and ·nameÒ was a real, cos I dunno he’s got something and he’s usually about medium (142704: 26)
It may seem from these examples that the choice of verb and verb form in narratives is completely haphazard. We would like to argue that this is not the case; rather the examples reveal some interesting facts regarding the nature of tense shift and some fairly consistent principles that apply. Firstly, there appears to be a clear correlation between choice of verb and tense form. It is primarily go that is chosen in the historical present tense, while say more commonly appears as a past form. Hence, the default choices seem to be the forms goes and said. That tense form is sensitive to the choice of verb (or vice versa) is further shown in Table 5.6. We note that go is the preferred verb in the historical present tense and accounts for 90 per cent of the tokens of the historical present, while say is the
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Table 5.6.The use of go and say in past time contexts
historical present tense past tense Σ
go
percentage
say
percentage
961 174 1135
.90 .29
102 436 538
.10 .71
preferred verb when explicitly denoting past time, at 71 per cent. This difference is significant at χ2 £ 680,268. Secondly, choice of verb form appears to be sensitive to the context of use. In sequences of reporting segments with shifts in narrative persona, the speakers tend to be ‘uncreative’ and use the same verb form repeatedly rather than shift verbs, as is clear from the series and Sean goes … and Truax goes … and Sean goes … and Truax goes and and I said … and he said … and I said … and he said. So the particular verb forms tend to cluster in narratives containing rapid narrative speaker shifts. Thirdly, certain parts of the story are generally told in the past tense, notably the introductory lines, conclusive lines (coda) and side comments, in order to anchor the story in time or place. If a sentence contains an anchor such as last night or today it is not likely to have a present tense verb, as is seen in example (155) above. These are primarily textual functions of tense shift that seem to have only a faint relation to the story-highlight principle that is commonly said to be the main motivation for the historical present tense. And finally, we note that it is primarily the quotative verbs that are subject to tense shift, and not the other verbs. Sequences of the type and A goes … and B goes are extremely common and seem to have achieved a formulaic status for certain speakers. In addition, it should be pointed out that a special type of narrative, the humourous joke, is commonly told in the historical present tense throughout, without tense shifts. This is understandable, since jokes are ficticious and ‘universal’, and therefore need not be anchored in a particular time or placed in a particular setting. As regards aspectual variation, it is less easy to point towards systematicity in the distribution, but example (156) shows that both simple past/present and the past/present progressive occur in the same narrative extract: (156) And then they were being really gross like going oh but you know we, we, we fancy you, I was going … okay, they were going, erm oh house
Variation in the use of reported speech
entertainment, I went yeah and they go, we we want you to do a striptease … and they were going oh actually no erm stockings and, and. …and they were going oh no you have to do it, you have to do it, I was going, ·shoutingÒyeah right cos I do actually. …Cos she goes, she was going oh and I didn’t know the UCCA forms, …and he was going oh it, it’s gonna be really odd (142307: 387–407)
It is difficult to be conclusive as regards possible semantic differences between the two constructions; there seems to be little ground for claiming that features such as limited duration or incompleteness characterize the meanings of the progressive quotative constructions, since they virtually always refer to a single, non-recurring, speech event (with one possible exception, in the utterance Everyone started going, Linda!, which indicates repeated action). But again, we note that occurrences of this particular construction tend to cluster in speaker shift sequences. The distribution of the two verbs is as shown in Table 5.7: Table 5.7.The progressive versus non-progressive use of go and say
simple progressive
go
percentage
say
percentage
1173 222
.65 .79
639 60
.35 .21
We note that it is go rather than say that tends to go with the progressive aspect, and accounts for 79 per cent of the tokens. This difference is slightly less dramatic than that reported above, but is nevertheless significant at χ2 £ 21,472. As has become evident, some uses of quotative verbs are non-standard. This applies commonly in one particular grammatical context, namely I goes, and to some extent I says, but only rarely in other contexts. This can be seen from Table 5.8. As expected, these forms are by no means evenly distributed in the corpus; virtually all are uttered by speakers from Hackney and Tower Hamlets. It seems that certain quotative contexts with go have a tendency to attract non-standard usage, more so than the use of go or other verbs in other contexts. 5.4.3 Correlation with mimickry and sound effects Given that go in all varieties of English is readily used with sounds and as a verb to indicate the ‘language’ of animals, a justifiable null hypothesis might be that
123
124 Trends in Teenage Talk
Table 5.8.Non-standard use of go and say I goes you goes they goes he go
74 1 1 2
I says
9
go is still more common when a speaker is acting out — staging — what a narrative persona uttered. As a consequence, we can assume that it is more common to use go than say before mimickry and sound effects. In this section we briefly investigate if this is the case in our data. Consider, for instance, (157)–(160): (157) and you’re just about to go to sleep and she goes nv purring noises /nv so loud! And yesterday she jumped over the balcony right and (132707: 38)
(158) Yeah, Mary kept saying … urgh! Urgh! They’re on the (132611: 260)
(159) and Baby bear goes, mimicking baby voice Daddy can I sleep with you tonight?·/Ò (132701: 87)
(160) He said mimicking foreign accent man it’s got nothing to do with you man, keep out man.·/Ò (140301: 19)
The examples show that, despite the fact that say denotes a verbal representation, it can, like go, appear before a quoted sound, and both go and say can correlate with mimickry. But it also seems from our data that only go is used if the reported utterance contains exclusively sound effects. Table 5.9 shows the distribution of these types of use. We note that, by far, go is the chosen verb when a speaker stages an utterance with mimickry or a sound effect. This shows that, due to its vague and Table 5.9.The correlation of go and say with mimickry and sound effects
go say
Mimickry
Sound effects
71 12
150 2
Variation in the use of reported speech
Table 5.10.Absolute and relative figures of go and say according to age go Preadolescence (0–9) Early adolescence (10–13) Middle adolescence (14–16) Late adolescence (17–19) Young adults (20–29) Older adults (30+)
2 235 1001 124 0 4
say 1.08 2.44 4.16 3.37 0.00 0.17
3 134 448 61 4 31
1.62 1.39 1.86 1.66 3.51 1.34
general meaning, go is inclined to take a wider range of stylistically different quotative complements than say. 5.4.4 Social parameters As regards the use of go and say in relation to the social parameters, we note, firstly, that the use of go versus say is clearly a function of the age of the speakers. This is shown in Table 5.10 and Figure 5.3. This and the following tables give absolute frequencies and relative frequencies per thousand words. The use of quotative go drops off sharply after late adolescence, and on the 4.50 4.00 3.50 3.00 2.50 2.00 1.50 1.00 0.50 Pr ea do les ce nc e Ea rly ad ol es ce nc M e id dl ea do les ce nc e La te ad ol es ce nc e Yo un ga du lts O ld er ad ul ts
0.00
Figure 5.3.Distribution of go and say across age groups
go say
125
126 Trends in Teenage Talk
basis of these data, it seems fair to conclude that the use of go as a quotative verb is primarily a feature of adolescent speech. The use of say, on the other hand, is remarkably evenly distributed across the speaker groups. As previously mentioned, the young adult group, which has a higher proportion of say uses, cannot really be assigned much weight, due to its low degree of contribution in the corpus. As regards gender, the data that emerge are shown in Table 5.11 and Figure 5.4: Table 5.11.Absolute and relative figures of go and say according to gender go female male
say
817 562
3.81 2.44
399 318
1.86 1.38
4.50 4.00 3.50 3.00 2.50
female
2.00
male
1.50 1.00 0.50 0.00
go
say
Figure 5.4.Distribution of go and say according to gender
Overall, the girls use more quotative verbs than the boys, and there is a considerable female predominance in the use of go, but no significant difference in the use of say. This would suggest that it is the adolescent girls who are in the forefront as regards the use of the ‘new’ quotative verb, as with many other innovative linguistic features. The distribution according to the three social classes in COLT is as shown in Table 5.12 and Figure 5.5:
Variation in the use of reported speech 127
Table 5.12.Absolute and relative figures of go and say according to class go high (1) middle (2) low (3)
say
183 101 464
2.27 1.49 5.81
142 67 133
1.76 0.99 1.66
7.00 6.00 5.00 4.00
high (1)
3.00
low (3)
middle (2)
2.00 1.00 0.00
go
say
Figure 5.5.Distribution of go and say according to social class
The lowest social class stands out as the group that uses quotative go the most. As regards the other groups, the distribution of the two verbs is remarkably similar. So the overall quantitative difference between go and say is primarily due to an overrepresentation in the lowest social class. In the two ethnic groups, the distribution of go and say is as shown in Table 5.13 and Figure 5.6. We note that there is a massive difference between the two groups with respect to the choice of go or say as reporting verbs. It is primarily the ethnic minority speakers who use quotative go. The white speakers behave more traditionally in this respect, and opt for say as a quotative marker. Hence, it seems fair to conclude that the use and spread of go as a reporting verb is mainly performed by lower class girls with an ethnic minority background, but it is quite common in other teenage groups as well.
128 Trends in Teenage Talk
Table 5.13.Absolute and relative figures of go and say according to ethnicity
Ethnic minority White
go
say
375 193
99 168
400 350 300 250
Ethnic minority
200
White
150 100 50 0
go
say
Figure 5.6.Distribution of go and say according to ethnic group
5.4.5 Another related use of go Concluding the discussion of reported speech, we would like to mention briefly a related use of go that does not seem to fit readily in the categories described above, and which is certainly not really comparable with say. Relevant examples are shown in (161)–(165): (161) And he’s sitting there in chapel and he’s going, ·nvÒclap·/nvÒ … (rubbing hands) (141707: 347)
(162) It was like a sort of, she just went (banging noise), and just, fell over and I just (142704: 154)
(163) And you know the bit where erm, she’s in bed and the hand comes out from behind the pillow and it goes (makes sound effect) over the back of her head and she goes, she goes (13290: 130)
Variation in the use of reported speech 129
(164) Sometimes he goes, watch this … through his nose. There’s this big green thing come out of his nose! He simply went ·nvÒmimicking sound effect·/nvÒ (132707: 69)
(165) Charlie: You’re, you’re rushing through. You’re, you’re starting off so you go, (playing piano), then you suddenly realize, I know this, you’re going (playing piano fast). Jordan: Right. (140201: 43–44)
The examples show that there is a tendency to use go before the report of what is not a rendering of a verbal act but a physical one. These are clearly not quotations in the traditional sense; nevertheless, the examples have a ‘quotational feel’ to them. This is because these utterances involve meta-representations, just like ordinary quotatives, but these meta-representations capture somebody’s previous actions, such as rubbing hands, banging the microphone on the table, bringing up phlegm, and even playing the piano in a certain manner. It is clear that go is ‘reportive’ in this sense, but it is very far from being comparable to the verb say. Rather, it is used as a general verb indicating action, with meanings akin to ‘act like this’. This usage may not be a true quotative use, but it is certainly part of the staging of a narrative or other report of a previous (speech) event, and it involves a visible and/or audible demonstration of somebody’s physical action. To conclude, this adds further support to our previous claim that go and say are not entirely equivalent — go is sometimes used where say would be inappropriate. This also shows that the former verb is very closely connected with the concept of staging the persona of a narrative.
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Chapter 6
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers
– I dunno nuffink about sex. I’m an innocent child. – Mm. Really? – I dunno nuffink about the birds and bees. Simon & Tom, 15
In this chapter we present various aspects of grammar in the London teenage vernacular as manifested in the COLT conversations. The chapter consists of two parts. The first part, which is largely a recapitulation of Stenström (1997b), starts by a survey of non-standard grammatical features, such as multiple negation, participle for past tense, and double comparatives. The most common non-standard features observed in the London teenage vernacular in COLT are then compared with those in the Reading teenage vernacular reported by Cheshire (1982). The purpose of the comparison was to check whether the teenage language of the early 1990s had changed since Cheshire made her recordings. The first part ends with a comparison of the use of non-standard features in a subcorpus of COLT, representing teenagers with different social backgrounds. In the second part of the chapter, we discuss the COLT teenagers’ sometimes unorthodox (enough and well), sometimes excessive (really) and sometimes offensive (bloody and fucking) use of intensifiers. Here we pay special attention to differences with respect to gender and socio-econimic belonging.
6.1 Non-standard grammatical features There is a lot of non-standard grammar in COLT. One illustrative example is (166), which was recorded by 13-year old Ronny from Tower Hamlets. He is talking to some of his friends Fred and Brett, who are the same age and from the same area:
132
Trends in Teenage Talk
(166) Fred: Ron: Fred: Ron: Fred: Ron: Fred: Ron: Fred: Ron: Fred:
Ron:
Fred: Brett: Fred: Brett: Fred: Ron: Fred: Ron: Fred: Ron: Fred:
Ron: Fred:
Right, and then she said, Barry’s got the cheek, cos that’s boring around here, and it’s [boring] [Well it is.] cos he don’t do nuffink right, and when he [does do] [Ah but] she wouldn’t exactly go [down, go down] [right going down there.] you know down ·unclearÒ with someone wearing like, ·laughingÒ you know·/Ò She goes, she goes, this is what she did, right? She goes, Barry’s got the cheek to say it’s boring round here [cos he’s] [Brett.] and when he don’t come out, oh and when he does go out he don’t ask us to go. out, he’ll say nah All my, [all] [And] then I said that they don’t hang about with us Linda. She goes yeah, so? But we still ask them, it wouldn’t he= it wouldn’t he= saying like it wouldn’t help [them to ask] [Yeah but when] we do come round whe=, while, when youse asked us, she doesn’t do nuffink. She goes woo ooh ooh, I’ve done it. Aaah. And she said that youse are really out of order not going out she said because she wanted to sit in that close [with] [Mm.] Yeah. ·singingÒDa, dun na da·/Ò. [Barry!] [I ain’t] saying nuffink any more. Yeah. Well she’s Barry, even if she wants to, sat down and Yeah, but now we’ve found out, [I mean like, like] [It’ll hard=, it’ll hardly] everyone sits down it’ll hardly be me or Ryan will it? [Or Brett.] [Barry’d] have to be, yeah, this is what I’m saying, and then we, like we’d move up so Linda sit next to him, but she wouldn’t know though.m What, she’d sit with, sitting on her own? She said if I could get us chucked outside the cinema, chucked out the cinema cos, Barry said he’d get us chucked out the cinema before, she goes and we can all pretend ·laughingÒwe don’t
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers
Ron: Fred:
them·/Ò. He goes [let them] [I] ge= go by theirselves (sic).
(135306: 143)
All three have a strong cockney accent, and we notice that their talk is not grammatically correct according to Standard English. The following nonstandard grammatical features can be observed: multiple negation (eg he don’t do nuffink), the form ain’t for am not, non-standard pronominal forms (youse, theirselves), negative concord (we was, he don’t), auxiliary deletion (Linda sit), and simple for complex preposition (out the cinema). Ronny and his friends live and go to school in Tower Hamlets, which is described as a deprived London area with high unemployment and numerous Commonwealth immigrants and, moreover, said to be ‘historically associated’ with Cockney (cf. Berland 1997 and Chapter 2 this volume). This agrees with the findings in COLT: non-standard grammatical features of the types exemplified in (166) were almost exclusively found in conversations involving teenagers from the lower social classes, many of whom have an ethnic minority background. And the pronunciation of nothing transcribed as nuffink is typical of Cockney. 6.1.1 The Reading and London teenage vernaculars compared In her well-known study of the Reading youngsters’ vernacular, Cheshire (1982) gives a systematic account of the non-standard grammatical features observed in a group of lower working class girls and boys aged from 9 to 17. Cheshire’s observations of the Reading youth vernacular compared with our own observations of the non-standard grammatical features in the London teenage vernacular are displayed in Table 6.1. Not much seems to have changed during the ten-year period, which shows that grammatical features are fairly stable. The two groups studied differ not only with respect to recording period but also with respect to location (big city vs. small town), age (some of the Reading informants are as young as nine) and socio-economic belonging (all the Reading informants have a lower working class background). Yet, it appears that they have nearly all the non-standard grammatical features observed in common. The only exceptions are the use of wunnit (for wasn’t it, won’t it) and dunnit (for doesn’t it) and the non-standard use of the pro-form one(s), which are only recorded in the London data, and what with a personal antecedent and the use of worse for bad, which only occur in the Reading data. The non-standard use of the prop word one is demonstrated
133
134 Trends in Teenage Talk
Table 6.1.Non-standard grammatical features in Reading and London Non-standard features
Reading
London
negative concord: lexical verbs non-standard past/participle: lexical verbs past participle for imperfect non-standard verb forms ain’t, in’t, in innit as an invariant tag wunnit as an invariant tag use of dunnit non-standard tense in conditional sentences never as negative preterite marker multiple negation them as demonstrative pronoun non-standard reflexives non-standard use of the pro-form one(s) what with nonpersonal antecedent what with personal antecedent intrusive -s nouns of measurement in singular simple for complex preposition complex for simple preposition no adjective/adverb distinction regular for non-standard comparison double comparison worse for bad simple for complex prepositions complex for simple prepositions
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
in (167), where Gwen and Set are discussing the latest shoe fashion with their teacher, Lon. Notice also the non-standard use of innit as an invariant tag and the use of the personal pronoun them as a demonstrative pronoun: (167) Lon:
Because I mean did you see that er; on er they showed it on the Clothes Show that thing when she was wearing it and she went over. Gwen: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah. She dropped over innit. Lon: I’m surprised she, surprised she didn’t break her ankles. Gwen: Oh well. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ That’s how it [is Sir]. Set: [You walk] in them big platforms tonight. Gwen: Yeah that’s the that’s the that’s the style innit. That’s the style, platforms.
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers
Set: No it’s a bit over the top. Gwen: Yeah but my ones, my platforms are out that I’ve got. They’re not way over the top. (134803: 50–58)
Here ones replaces platforms, which have just been mentioned, and which are repeated (my platforms) to make things clear. In Standard English we find substitute one(s) after adjectives and determiners. The usage illustrated here is even mentioned in current dictionaries such as, for instance, Quirk et al. (1985) and Biber et al. (1999), which seems to indicate that it is a recent development. What Table 6.1 does not show is that the use of the tag innit occurs only transcribed as in it in the Reading data, while the form innit has as many as 352 occurrences in COLT. In other words, it looks as if the frequent use of the tag innit is either a very recent phenomenon or a feature that is characteristically found in the London teenage vernacular (for a detailed discussion of the use of innit, see Chapter 7). 6.1.2 Two socio-economic groups compared In 1997, we carried out a study based on a small subcorpus of COLT. The object of the study was to find out to what extent socio-economic belonging and gender had an effect on the use of non-standard grammatical features (cf. Stenström 1997). In order to make a fair comparison, we aimed at a subcorpus consisting of four sets of speakers, two male and two female, who were the same age but with different socio-economic and school backgrounds. Therefore, we looked for two pairs of recruits, each pair consisting of a boy and a girl, hoping that the four recruits would have recorded roughly the same amount of talk, involving only speakers of their own age and gender, all with a background similar to that of the recruit. We ended up with 14-year-old Gwen and Ion with a class 3 (lower class) background and 13-year-old Chelsea and 14-year-old Simon a class 1 ((upper) middle class)) background. The recruits are presented in Table 6.2, which also illustrates the difficulty of finding exact or even near enough matches, when the collection of the corpus, by necessity, has not been under strict control (see Chapter 1). The recordings differ considerably in length, and some of them are not only mixed, i.e. with both female and male speakers, but they also contain the occasional adult speaker. The contributions from the adult speakers are so brief and so few, however, that they do not distort the results and can be disregarded. The co-speakers belong to the same age group as the recruits and
135
136 Trends in Teenage Talk
Table 6.2.Characteristics of the recruits Recruit name/ Sex Age School number borough Simon / 1 Gwen / 6 Ion / 11 Chelsea / 13 Total
M F M F
14 14 14 13
Borough of residence
Hackney Hackney Hackney Stoke Newington Tower Hamlets Bow Camden West-minster
SocioNumber of economic words recorded group 1 3 3 1
10,700 19,699 3,788 12,030 46,217
have a similar background. What we did not know when we carried out the study, and which, indeed, has an impact on the results, was that Gwen and her co-speakers are Jamaicans. The non-standard grammatical features in the subcorpus are displayed in Table 6.3. Due to the low figures and the differences in conversation size, the relative occurrence has been calculated per 10,000 words. The results of the study point to an overwhelming difference between the class 3 and the class 1 teenagers’ use of non-standard grammatical features: the number of occurrences in Gwen’s and Ion’s lower class conversations is almost eight times as high as that in Chelsea’s and Simon’s (upper) middle class conversations. The frequent use of negative concord and of ain’t and innit in Ion’s and Gwen’s conversations is particularly striking. Other non-standard features that occur only in their conversations are active for passive, nonstandard reflexive pronouns, non-standard use of what, measurement words in the singular and never for negative preterite. A closer look at the class 3 conversations shows that the form ain’t is most frequently used by Ion and his (mainly male) friends, while innit occurs more often in Gwen’s (mainly female) conversations, which probably points to her and her co-speakers’ ethnic background (see Chapters 2 and 7). In for isn’t and double comparative are only found in the class 1 conversations, notably Chelsea’s. Searches in the entire COLT corpus showed that the tendencies observed in the subcorpus regarding the use of ain’t and innit prevail also in the larger corpus: ain’t is typically used by boys and innit by girls. Moreover, both ain’t and innit are far more frequent among lower class than among (upper) middle class speakers: ain’t is eight times as common and innit fifteen times as common. As regards residential area, ain’t is more frequently used by the teenagers
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers
Table 6.3.Non-standard grammatical features in the subcorpus Non-standard features
negative concord non-standard use of Q-tag past participle for preterite non-standard verb form active for passive non-standard tense in conditional sentence use of ain’t use of innit use of in’t it use of in them as demonstrative pronoun prop word one(s) non-standard reflexive pronouns non-standard use of what intrusive -s measurement words in singular multiple negation never for negative preterite no distinction adjective/adverb double comparative Total
Class 1
Class 3
Simon 10,700 words
Chelsea 12,030 words
Gwen 19,699 words
Ion 3,788 words
n
%
n
%
n
%
n
%
2 2 1 – –
1.9 1.9 0.9 – –
3 1 3 1 –
2.5 0.8 2.5 0.8 –
41 3 – 3 1
20.8 1.5 – 1.5 0.5
9 – 1 2 –
23.8 – 2.6 5.3 –
5 – – – – 1 – – – – – – – – 11
4.7 – – – – 0.9 – – – – – – – – 1.0
7 1 – 2 1 – – – – – 3 – 1 1 24
5.8 0.8 – 1.7 0.8 – – – – – 2.5 – 1.8 1.8 2.0
19 93 6 1 10 5 1 – – 3 10 3 1 – 200
9.6 47.2 3.0 0.5 5.1 2.5 0.5 – – 1.5 5.1 1.3 0.5 – 10.2
35 2 – – – – – 1 2 – – – – – 53
92.4 5.3 – – – – – 0.5 5.3 – – – – – 14.0
living in Hackney and Tower Hamlets than anywhere else, while innit is most frequently used by the Hackney teenagers. All the non-standard grammatical features displayed in Table 6.3 are exemplified below: negative concord non-standard use of Q-tag past participle for imperfect non-standard verb form active for passive tense in conditionals ain’t
She still owe me forty pence and that make it worse though. Sounds good to you don’t it And this is the one we done last, last week yeah? I ain’t wore much of my platform to school yeah. It’s meant to wear like this Lucky if we’d have left early we still could have gone Ain’t that absolutely stupid
137
138
Trends in Teenage Talk
innit in’t in
She dropped over innit So you must have left that room early in’tit? Look handsome prince come riding pass and sweep you off your feet in she? them as demonstrative pronoun Where did you get them boots from? prop word one(s) Yeah but my ones, my platforms are out that I’ve got non-standard reflexive pronouns They know how to defend theirselves non-standard use of what It’s like this is the only nights what them, d’ya know intrusive -s Why haven’t yous got a part in … measurement words in singular I have five pound here multiple negation No you cannot use nothing never as negative preterite No you never. You got ears. no distinction adj/adv I slept funny double comparative They’re much more chea=, they’re much more better
The question is if and if so to what extent teenage language differs from adult language with respect to the use of non-standard grammar. Coupland (1988), who compared the language spoken in Cardiff with the findings of Hughes & Trudgill (1979) and those of Cheshire (1982), could conclude that most of the non-standard features found in these studies are typical of most urban British dialects. The most prominent features are: – – – – – – –
negative concord never as past tense negative them as a demonstrative adjective absence of plural marking with some quantified nouns after numerals adjectival form with adverbial function reduction of complex prepositions regularizing of the reflexive pronoun paradigm
A comparison with the results in Edwards’ (1993) study of the grammar of southern British English also shows that the adult and the teenage vernaculars have a number of non-standard grammatical features in common. However, features that Edwards does not mention are the non-standard use of Q-tags, active for passive, non-standard conditional sentences, non-standard use of the prop-word one, intrusive -s, and not least the use of the tag innit. On the other hand, a search in the British National Corpus (BNC) shows that all these features can be observed to a greater or lesser extent among adults in Great Britain. A more detailed study is required to show to what extent the usage differs between teenagers and adults.
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers 139
6.2 On the trendy use of intensifiers Intensifiers, as we define them, are items that amplify and emphasize the meaning of an adjective or an adverb. The COLT teenagers, and the girls in particular, have a predilection for really in this function. This is illustrated in (168), where Gwen is telling Tess how she managed to steal the show by outshining Lottie one night at a school gathering: (168) Tess: Katie:
Was Lottie there Actually no that was the night she was really pissed off because, erm people were paying more attention to me than they were to her. I don’t know why it’s because I decide that I’m gonna be really outgoing and I really do and I was really loud and really boisterous and she’s quite resigned like that and she thought I sh=bit shagged off with me. and then like I was doing, there was this really good looking bloke
(142704: 119–125)
The boys, too, use really quite a lot, but they are generally inclined to use more powerful intensifiers than the girls, which is reflected, not least, in their more frequent use of ‘dirty’ intensifiers, i.e. taboo words (cf. Chapter 4). In (169), where Ryan and Elliot are discussing football teams, the taboo intensifier bloody is accompanied by the less offensive intensifiers absolutely and really and the less common intensifier right: (169) Ryan:
It was nil nil at home to Manchester City, who are absolutely bollocks anyway, and it was a really bollocks match there was about three chances. Elliot: That sums up Chelsea. Ryan: Yeah. Elliot: Well Arsenal, go on give them your Ryan: Arsenal? Elliot: your run down of Arsenal. Ryan: all I need to say about Arsenal is, nil nil, no score draw Elliot: ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Rusell: I rest my case. …And Tottenham, I mean Elliot: Bloody unconsistent. (sic) Ryan: they’re about as consistent as fucking the referee that we always have, cos they’re always biased towards the other team, well I think so anyway you know, even if they give this penalties which
140 Trends in Teenage Talk
were never penalties and things like that but, and they play about fifty minutes extra time so they can like score, the equalise and win it, so they did against Everton but, oh no. Elliot: How long has this tape been going on for? Cos this is, this ·unclearÒ is actually, shit. Ryan: ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Elliot: I think I’ve just broken it, well he’s not actually, the bloke who’s doing this isn’t actually here, so he doesn’t know I’m doing this, so when he finds out I’ve, that I’ve been like doing this, he’s gonna be really fucked off. And he’ll say that this is, ·mimickingÒooh this is Pierre, Pierre is a really happy person.·/Ò Rusell: Explain the song Shiny Happy People. Elliot: Yeah shiny happy people who are … ·unclearÒ Ryan: ·nvÒgiggle·/nvÒ Elliot: ·mimickingÒSorry I’ve just been a right sad bastard alright and my name’s Pierre.·/Ò (141805: 30–46)
Really, right and the taboo intensifiers bloody and fucking will be dealt with in Section 6.2.3. The most common — and some unusual — realizations of intensifiers in COLT are listed in Table 6.4, which also shows to what extent they are used to premodify an adjective or an adverb, respectively. According to the definition, intensifiers can premodify adverbs as well as adjectives, but as Table 6.4 shows, very few of the intensifiers listed occur as adverb Table 6.4.Premodifying intensifiers in COLT Item
Percentage
Adjective
Adverb
Total
extremely very completely totally absolutely really bloody fucking enough right dead well
100 .82 .60 .59 .51 .44 .17 .09 .06 .05 .05 .02
13 297 33 20 31 659 50 40 9 8 3 32
– 70 – – – 3 – – 1 94 – 5
,13 ,448 ,55 ,34 ,61 1,521 ,291 ,448 ,155 1,751 ,60 2,332
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers
premodifiers in the COLT conversations. Very and right are the only ones that are used fairly frequently as adverb intensifiers, while enough (e.g. enough far), really (e.g. really clearly) and well (e.g. well early) are used rather seldom. Most of the items listed are multifunctional, which explains why a high total frequency of occurrence is by no means directly related to the frequency of a specific function, such as that of intensifier. This is best illustrated by well on the one hand and extremely on the other: while only two per cent of well, which is by far the most common item, are used as intensifiers, all occurrences of extremely, the least common item, are used as intensifiers. Moreover, considering that very is generally regarded as the prototypical intensifier (see e.g. the definition of intensifiers in Collins Cobuild Dictionary 1987: 760), 82 per cent is an unexpectedly low figure. This low figure can partly be explained by the fact that very is not only used as an adjective/adverb premodifier in the corpus but also serves as an attribute modifying a noun (e.g. the very word exam). In addition, it often serves as an ellipted response, e.g. with an adjective left out as in (170), where the adjective powerful is retrievable from the immediately prior context: (170) Dylan: Kenneth:
what. were atombombs really powerful yes very
(141202: 29–30)
And one should not forget that the material contains a fairly large number of interruptions, reformulations and ·unclearÒ instances. Instances of potential intensifiers in such positions have been disregarded altogether. 6.2.1 Teenagers, adults and intensifiers Teenagers and adults do not use exactly the same set of intensifiers; nor do they use the ones they have in common to the same extent. The difference between the London teenagers in COLT and the adults in the spoken part of the BNC, representing the whole country, is partly reflected in Table 6.5, which displays the selected list of items used as adjective modifiers presented in Paradis (2000: 151). The figures representing number of words have been normalised to one million words in each corpus for ease of comparison. As reflected in the total, the overall dominance of adjective intensifiers in the BNC is overwhelming. It shows that the adults use intensifiers almost twice as frequently as the teenagers. One reason for this large discrepancy proposed by Paradis (2000: 154) is that ‘teenagers use other means for reinforcement’, for instance swearwords, such as bloody and fucking and emphasizers, such as really.
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Table 6.5. Adjective intensifiers in COLT and the BNCa Item
COLT
BNC
very absolutely well completely totally extremely enough
532 64 62 58 38 24 12
1,241 ,69 ,2 ,29 ,35 ,34 ,0
Total
790
1,410
a The fact that the figures in this table do not agree entirely with the figures in the tables that follow is due to the following (1) It is not based on the latest, updated, version of COLT; (2) it does not include premodification of adverbs.
These items are not included in her list, but that it is indeed a relevant suggestion is reflected in Table 6.4, which shows that really is the most common intensifier in COLT, more than twice as frequent as very, which is the predominating intensifier in the BNC (Table 6.5), and that bloody, in particular, and also fucking are used quite frequently as intensifiers by the teenagers. Some of the intensifying items used by the adults are very little used by the teenagers, items such as awfully, deeply, seriously, terribly and truly, with only one or two occurrences each, and utterly, which the teenagers do not use at all. The most interesting findings are maybe that the teenagers use right and well as adjective intensifiers and that some of them treat enough as a premodifying instead of postmodifying intensifier. A survey of these items in the BNC shows that well is hardly used at all as an adjective intensifier, and that enough never occurs other than in postmodifying position. Enough, right and well will be dealt with in Section 6.2.3. 6.2.2 Girls, boys and intensifiers Several studies have indicated that women use significantly more intensifiers than men (e.g. Holmes 1995: 129, 1998: 110). The gender difference is also manifest in COLT, where the intensifiers that we investigated (including both adjective and adverb intensifiers) were found to be more common in the girls’ than in the boys’ conversations. This is demonstrated in Table 6.6. Totally speaking, the girls’ use of intensifiers predominates with four per cent.
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers 143
Table 6.6.Frequency of intensifiers in relation to gender Item
Girls
Percentage
Boys
Percentage
Total
really very right bloody fucking well completely absolutely totally extremely enough
402 169 44 20 11 6 13 15 16 4 2
.61 .46 .45 .40 .28 .16 .40 .48 .80 .30 .22
260 198 54 30 29 31 20 16 4 9 7
.39 .54 .55 .60 .72 .84 .60 .52 .20 .70 .78
,662 ,367 ,98 ,50 ,40 ,37 ,33 ,31 ,20 ,13 ,9
Total
702
.52
658
.48
1,360
These figures should, however, be seen in relation to the total number of words uttered, which corresponds to 200,390 in the girls’ conversations and 216,224 in the boys’ conversations. Despite the difference in the total number of words, the difference between the genders is significant (χ2 = 7.08, p < .01. df = 1). What contributes most to the discrepancy is the girls’ very frequent use of really, which makes up as much as 30 per cent of the entire intensifier usage as opposed to the boys’ 19 per cent, and which is by no means outweighed by the boys’ more frequent use of very. As we have seen (Table 6.6), the girls use intensifiers more frequently than the boys, while the boys tend to use the strongest ones, either in the form of adverbs (extremely angry, completely paralytic, absolutely stupid) or taboo words (bloody mean, fucking weird). The only exception is totally, which is more often used by the girls (totally fucked off his head). Notice also that it is the boys that are most keen on using right and especially well and premodifying enough as intensifiers (cf. Table 6.7). 6.2.3 Some ‘teenage-specific’ intensifiers Some of the items that we have been dealing with merit a more detailed discussion: 1) items that are used in a non-standard way and almost exclusively in teenage talk, notably enough, right, and well, and 2) items that are used as intensifiers more frequently in teenage talk than in adult talk, such as really and the taboo words bloody and fucking.
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6.2.3.1The preposed intensifier enough As we have already pointed out, some of the COLT teenagers have a tendency to place the intensifier enough before instead of after the word it modifies. One is 13-year old Kenneth from Bow. In extract (171) he is trying in vain to persuade his friend Cliff to come upstairs and listen to the recording of their conversation: (171) Kenneth: Cliff: Kenneth: Cliff: Kenneth:
Come upstairs and listen to the tape? Blinding tape! do you wanna hear it? Can’t be bothered. Come on Cliff listen. It’s funny [man I te=] [Bring it] down here. Nah. It’s better you got them speakers. It’s enough funny man I’m telling ya! Come upstairs, play on the hi-fi. I I, bet you any money you’ll laugh … ·nvÒsniff·/Ò … ·nvÒlaugh·/Ò
(135602: 34–38)
The example is straightforward in so far as there is no mistaking what is modified; it can only be the adjective funny. But the scope of enough is sometimes ambiguous, in that enough occurs as an intensifier not only before an adjective in subject complement position (It’s enough funny), as in example (171), but also before an adjective modifying a noun (Wendy said enough bad things), as in example (172), where 13-year old Ronny is chatting with Brett and Danielle in a park in Tower Hamlets: (172) Danielle: Brett: Danielle: Brett: Danielle: Brett: Danielle: Brett: Danielle:
Wendy. she thinks Ryan’s a sod. don’t tell Russ= I mean, oh Ryan’s gonna l=, are you gonna let listen. Russel listen Most probably. yeah Let him listen. cos Wendy said [enough bad] [no but] things [about] [Wendy], Wendy, Wendy thinks everyone’s a sod No but Wendy said enough bad things about me and about Barry so I want Bill to hear er ah. that way enough No Barry, don’t, don’t say nuffink to Wendy though. right. that you hear it. okay
(135304: 3–11)
In this example, it is not entirely obvious what enough modifies. It could either modify the adjective alone (‘Wendy said things about me that were rather bad’)
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers
or the combination adjective and noun (‘Wendy said a number of bad things about me’). The sound track does not reveal whether bad is stressed or unstressed; with the stress on bad and not on things, there would be no doubt that it is the adjective that is the intensified item. For a discussion of ambiguity in premodification we refer to Quirk et al. (1985: 1342 ff). Table 6.7 displays the examples of the premodifier enough met with in COLT and shows the distribution among the speakers: Table 6.7.The premodifier enough Example
Speaker
School borough
Social Text No class
But Wendy said enough bad things about me It’s enough funny man I’m telling ya Can you sit on enough taller stools Excellent boot, enough far You’re enough bad My drawing’s enough crap It’s enough old Kieran was enough quiet
Danielle 13 Kenneth 13 Marc 13 Simon 14 Tommy 14 “ “ “
Tower Hamlets “ “ “ Barnet “ “ “
3 “ 2 3 2 “ “ “
135304 135602 138301 136104 139506 139506 139611 139614
The examples of premodifying enough are few, and so are the speakers who have adopted this usage, five in all, including only one girl, Danielle. They are all among the youngest COLT teenagers, all with a working-class or lowermiddle class background. Only two school boroughs are represented. The conversations in which this usage occurs are marked by various other non-standard features. Here are some examples from one of Tommy’s brief conversations (text 139614): What school she go to? They didn’t have no diluted orange. Gizzit (for ‘give us it’) She weren’t short. To who? Don’t say nuffink to him though. That’s narf nice. As we saw in Table 6.7, all but one of the examples of premodifying enough (enough far) are cases where it intensifies an adjective. Sometimes the wordclass status of the intensified item is debatable, however. One such item is crap.
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Its status in My drawing’s enough crap is clear enough: it is an adjective serving as subject complement. In other cases, the question arises whether it should be categorized as an adjective or a noun. It’s crap is a case in point. Cassell’s dictionary of slang (2000: 286) tells us that crap started being used as an adjective in the 1950s. Yet, we find, for instance, that the OED (1989) has no entry where crap is defined as an adjective. Cambridge International dictionary of English (1995: 320) is more up to date and lists crap as both a noun and as a ‘slightly taboo slang’ adjective, denoting something that is ‘worthless’, ‘nonsense’, etc. Likewise, The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998: 428) recognizes crap as an adjective meaning ‘extremely poor in quality’. A previous study of the word-class status of crap in COLT (Stenström 1999) shows that the teenagers use it as an adjective far more often than as a noun, and that they sometimes use it as an interjection and as an ‘emphatic’ verb. Considering that the word crap was originally a noun (cf. OED 1987: 1117–1118), the figures in Table 6.8, with examples from COLT, show that the adjective function has taken over: Table 6.8.The word-class status of crap Word class
Examples
n
%
adjective noun interjection ‘emphatic’ verb
this is a really crap university it’s a load of crap crap! crap me!
102 38 9 1
.70 .25 .04 .01
150
100
Total
This development indicates very clearly that crap is subject to grammaticalization (crap as a dirty slang word was dealt with in Chapter 4). Considering that occurrences in existing corpora are extremely rare, and that it has not been registered in recent grammar books or dictionaries, it might easily be assumed that the tendency to place the intensifier enough in preinstead of postposition has emerged very recently.1 However, the OED (1989: Vol 5, 273) tells us that, even though enough normally follows the adjective or adverb which it qualifies in Modern English, it often preceded it in Old and Middle English, and, moreover, that ‘occasional instances of this order occur in
1.See also Stenström (2000b).
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers 147
writings of the present century.’ (ibid). The earliest record is from the late 9th century, but the dictionary entry contains no record from the 19th century, let alone the 20th century. In the adult language, as reflected in the BNC, this usage is largely missing. A search in a subcorpus of 500,000 words spoken by adult Londoners, for instance, resulted in no instances whatsoever of a premodifying enough. And a study of 1,000 randomly selected instances of enough uttered by adults in the entire country resulted in two single instances of preposed enough, notably enough blooming and enough qualified. The fact that only one of the premodified items in these examples (qualified) has adjective status, and can be premodified by very (very qualified), which is the safest criterion of an adjective (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 413f), might be seen as an indication that this use of enough is all but non-existent in the adult language. Surprisingly enough, Lorenz (1999: 364) reports that he found as many as 16 different adjectives premodified by enough in a 200,000-word corpus of German learners’ writing, which is an even longer list than was met with in COLT, despite the fact that the size of the COLT material is more than twice as large. Lorenz’s findings are intriguing, although they may be due to interference from German and not a sign of a spread of non-standard usage. 6.2.3.2The frequent intensifier really What makes really particularly interesting is not only that it is the teenagers’ favourite intensifier but also the fact that it serves more functions in the discourse than any of the other items dealt with in this chapter, at the pragmatic as well as the syntactic level. For instance, it can be used as a response indicating a reaction to what the previous speaker said, while at the same time serving as a turn-taking device as in (173): (173) Pierre: So … wh sh= are they doing this, this survey ·unclearÒ Dylan: I dunno, they just wanna tape my voice. They want erm English thirteen year olds … why they chose me I shall never know. Pierre: Really? When’s your birthday? Dylan: June the eighth (141501: 47–49)
Pierre’s Really? seems to reflect that he is not at all convinced that ‘they’, i.e. the project team, are particularly interested in Dylan’s voice. And he does not seem to accept that they have chosen somebody who is only twelve, if they are aiming at13-year-olds.
148 Trends in Teenage Talk
Moreover, in addition to serving as an intensifier, really can serve as a staller for time, when the speaker does not find the right word or does not know how to proceed, as in (174): (174) my mother was away, and erm I was with him and we went out. he took me out to lunch and he took me, shopping and stu= well I mean he took, but he was really really, you know your father always dotes on you if it’s just you and him? And he bou= bought me this top and he bought me a, a polo neck and bought me a CD and then we went out to supper and then we went to a pub and everything, and erm, you know had a really decent conversation … (142703: 254)
The repetition of really followed by a brief pause (indicated by the comma) and a new start (you know your father…) is a clear sign that Rebecca needs time to formulate what she wants to say. Among the pragmatic functions attributed to really is not only that of an intensifier but also, somewhat surprisingly, that of a hedge, i.e. the opposite of an intensifier. Coates (1996: 164) argues, rather convincingly, that really can serve either as an intensifier reflecting strong commitment or as a hedge reflecting weak commitment, depending on the context of situation, the topic dealt with, the speaker’s commitment and her attention to the listener’s ‘face’. Coates gives the following example, where she claims that really, you know and sort of are used as hedges by softening the force of what is said, thereby protecting the listener’s feelings when presenting a ‘controversial account.’ (1996: 164): (175) Fred said she looked really lovely/ she was. at last wearing sort of modern clothes/ cos they don’t have to wear uniform/ she looked really pretty/ she’d had her hair sort of done/ and she looked really sort of- you know Fred said she felt very warm towards her because she looked so nice and human at last/
What is controversial in this account is that Helen’s positive statements imply ‘criticism of Kathy’s past appearance’, which the listener is fully aware of, and reinforces the assumption that a woman should look good, an assumption that the actual listener does not accept. This means, in other words, that the interpretation of what really does in conversation is highly dependent on what is being talked about, shared knowledge and how much attention participants pay to each other’s feelings.
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers 149
In extract (176) from COLT, where Katie and Judie are confessing to each other what they did to obtain a favour from boys, we argue that really is used both as an intensifier and as a hedge: (176) Judy: Katie: Judy: Katie:
Judy: Katie:
Judy: Katie:
No you say that I once got off with someone for some cigarettes, I never felt so awful I got off with someone for his hat. He had this wicked in Geneva had this [amazing Boss hat] [No, he was really] he was really nice and I did actually [like him] [and I] snogged him for it. And he goes to me, it was a Boss h= you know Boss the, the make, the clothes and the perfume and everything? He had this really nice cap, an it was a really smart cap, I just really liked it and he was a bit of an ugly, well he wasn’t ugly he was just really gormless and I said erm he must have been about twenty something and I said to him, can I have your hat, he said no it’s from a friend, it’s sentimental or something Was Lottie there? yeah, and she was snogging someone else·laughingÒat the time·/Ò I think actually no that was the night she was really pissed off because, erm, people were paying more attention to me than they were to her I don’t know why it’s because I decide that I’m gonna be really outgoing and I really do and I was really loud and really boisterous and she’s quite resigned like that and she thought I sh= git shagged off with me ·nvÒsiff·/Ò, and then like we we’d given each other eyes over the bar in this pub and Lottie goes well if you don’t hurry up I’m gonna go and have him, if you don’t hurry up, you know, and just like marched over. [I said Hannah give me a break] [Have you ever had ·unclearÒ] erm no, no I haven’t ever. But anyway she had, he had this nice cap so I said to him, you know can I have it and he said no it’s sentimental and I said well I’l do anything for it and he said, well we=er basically it just got down to well if you kiss me I’ll give it to you …
(142704: 118–129
The first part of the extract, where Judie confesses that she ‘got off’ with a boy to get some cigarettes, and Katie reveals that she had once ‘snogged’ a boy for
150 Trends in Teenage Talk
his hat, contains two controversial, self-disclosing accounts, which the girls do not seem to be very proud of, as reflected in Judy’s I never felt so awful. Here, really has rather a hedging function, softening the effect of what is said. In the second part, from Was Lottie there? and onward, where Katie boasts about her success at the pub, the function of really is regarded as an intensifier, which is also confirmed by the audio version of the texts — and our general knowledge of the girls from reading and listening to a number of other conversations where they participate. There are bound to be unclear cases, and as analysts we find it highly problematic to judge a speaker’s commitment and his/her regard to the listener’s face after the fact, and in addition, not being part of the conversation. As regards syntax, really can occur in more syntactic positions than the other intensifying items dealt with. Figure 6.1 shows that really can fill six different syntactic slots in the same short sentence, and with a difference in function depending on where it occurs in the sentence. Positions (a) and (b) are the only ones that are interesting to us here, i.e. where really premodifies an adjective (cf. Stenström 1986: 151): a. b. c. d. e. f.
this Q is really surprising this is a really surprising Q this is really a surprising Q this really is a surprising Q really this is a surprising Q this is a surprising Q really
Figure 6.1.Syntactic positions of really.
There is no doubt that really serves to intensify the adjective surprising in both (a) and (b), so here there is no ambiguity as regards scope, as in the case of enough (Section 6.2.3.1). 6.2.3.3Really or real It is well known that the form real as an intensifier instead of really is far more common in American English than in British English. Biber et al. (1999: 543) show, for instance, that while real occurs fourteen times per twenty million words in American English conversation, it occurs only once per twenty million words in British English conversation. They further state that ‘only AmE uses real with a variety of adjectives’ (ibid), the most common of which are good, nice, hard, bad, big, and easy.
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers
The study of the intensifier real in COLT shows, however, that it cooccurs not only with very common adjectives like bad and good but also with less common adjectives such as fucked, funny, loud, pissed, randy, sad, smooth and strange, though, admittedly, both fucked (‘exhausted’, ‘drunk’) and pissed (‘drunk’, ‘annoyed’) are rather common. This shows that real is on its way to enter British English, at least in British teenage language. One example of real for really is (177), where Rebecca and Tess are discussing a young female teacher: (177) Rebecca: Tess: Rebecca: Tess: Rebecca:
Well she’s really well toned and she always wears, cycling shorts and She’s a real randy fuck apparently. Is she? Really randy. How do you now?
(142602: 328–332)
Table 6.9 shows the distribution of real as an adjective intensifier in the COLT teenagers’speech: Table 6.9.Real as an adjective intensifier Example
Speaker
School borough
Social class
Text
Real bad sweaty socks He’s a real good friend of mine It’s real funny innit? It’s real strange Darren when he gets real pissed He must be getting real fucked Russ has been a real sad bastard We’ve got real good double maths She’s a real randy fuck apparently He was a real real loud you know
Mandy 14 Mandy 14 Ethan 12 Fredrick 13 Daimion 14 Elliot 16 Nicolas 16 Cliff 16 Tess 16 Rebecca 16
Hackney Hackney Camden Camden Barnet Hertfordshire Hertfordshire Hertfordshire Hertfordshire Hertfordshire
3 3 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1
132801 132801 139303 139303 139613 141709 141901 142005 142602 142704
Table 6.9 indicates that the use of real as an adjective intensifier is adopted by teenagers from all social classes in four London boroughs, though by more (upper) middle class than a lower class teenagers; only one of the speakers, Mandy, has a lower class background. This may imply that (upper) middleclass girls and boys are more open to, or maybe more exposed to, American usage than lower-class boys and girls. The instances are of course too few to permit any conclusions.
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6.2.3.4The adjective intensifier right Similarly to the use of the form real for really, the use of right as an adjective intensifier is likely to have been influenced by American English. According to the OED, this usage is said to be ‘chiefly U. S.’ (1989: vol. XIII, 930). The instances in COLT are very few, three of them even occurring in the same conversation, as reflected in Table 6.10. Notice that there are no girls involved. Table 6.10.Right as an adjective intensifier Example
Speaker
School borough Social class
Text No
he’s a right little swat I’ve just been a right sad bastard it was right embarrassing we’ll have a right old piss up have a right good laugh
Robert 14 Jack 16 Nicolas 15 Pierre 15 Pierre 15
Barnet Hertfordshire Hertfordshire Hertfordshire Hertfordshire
139707 141804 142106 142106 142106
1 1 1 1 1
Jack, Nicolas and Pierre are students at the Hertfordshire boarding-school, and like Robert, they have a class 1 background. A very tentative suggestion is therefore that this use of right is an (upper) middle class rather than a workingclass phenomenon, and even more typically so than the use of real (cf. Table 6.9). But of course, lacking sufficient data, this is pure speculation. Right followed by an adjective and a noun confronts us with the same problem regarding scope as enough, which was discussed in Section 6.2.3.1. This is reflected in example (178), which is an extract from Pierre’s conversation with Nicolas, and which also shows that right in this position is accompanied by quite a few instances of slangy language (cf. Chapter 4). Pierre is telling Nicolas what his parents just told him over the phone: (178) Pierre:
Nicolas:
Just had the best news yeah I spoke to my mum yeah, got lots of friends round coming for a party, I spoke to my dad. I said dad so you’ve got loads of friends coming round he goes yeah, we’ll have a right old piss up … It was wicked … No I’m well pleased, yeah, my parents’ll be nice and pissed, I’ll be nice and pissed, all my, all my parents’ mates have a right good laugh Oh no.
(142106: 36–37)
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers
The mere reading of the transcript does not clarify whether right modifies the adjective alone (right old, right good) or the rest of the noun phrase (right old piss up, right good laugh). But in this case the sound track makes it clear that both old and good are unstressed, and that it is not the adjective that carries the emphasis but that right serves as a noun modifier rather than an adjective modifier. This, unfortunately, leaves us with very few instances of the adjective intensifier right, notably right embarrassing and right sad. It is perhaps not surprising, in other words, that this usage is neither commented on by Quirk et al. (1985) nor by Biber et al. (1999), and that Collins Cobuild Dictionary (1987: 1249) refers to it only in combinations such as ‘the Right Reverend A. Thatcher’ and ‘the Right Honourable Gentleman’. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1984: 899), by contrast, refers to it as either British English slang or old use meaning ‘very’, as in He’s a right argumentative little brat and I’m right glad to see you, lad! In fact, this usage, too, is very old; the earliest record in the OED is dated c 1200. However, the latest record representing British English is from 1800, while the rest of the quotations in the OED, from the middle of the 19th century and onward, emerge from American literature. So, like the premodifying intensifier enough, the adjective intensifier right seems to have fallen out of use before the end of the 19th century in British English, but has started to reappear in the London teenage language towards the end of the 20th century. As regards the adult speakers in the BNC, their use of the intensifier right is in line with the description in Quirk et al. which says that ‘[a] few intensifying adverbs, particularly right and well, can premodify particles in phrasal verbs (…) as well as prepositions, or (perhaps rather) prepositional phrases’, e.g. He knocked the man right ·outÒ, The nail went right ·throughÒ the wall (1985: 449). 6.2.3.5The latent intensifier well The COLT teenagers use well not only to emphasize adverbials (well in advance, well on the way), participles (well equipped, well supported) and participial adjectives (well qualified) but also regular adjectives (well good, well nice). This is illustrated in examples (179) and (180). In (179) Cindy has just told Mandy and some other friends that she failed the driving test again: (179) Mandy: Just get, just get yourself a f= ·nvÒlaugh·/Ò just get yourself a false driving licence somehow. Alphie: Oh yeah, yeah [they’re really easy to get hold of] Mandy: [just write, just get a big] just get a big piece of
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Don: Many: Cindy: Alphie: Mandy: Don: Alphie:
paper and write driving licence on it. I know someone that sells them if you want one. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ See look, look seriously man I’d to that. No [I wouldn’t] [If I didn’t] fucking pass. I wouldn’t. If you get pulled over and they realize it’s false then you’re well shagged. Apart from just driving a car you’re also done for fraud.
(133905: 110)
The meaning of the verb shag provided in the dictionaries is ‘have sexual intercourse with’, while the meaning of the adjective shagged is said to be ‘exhausted’, neither of which are relevant in this context. ‘In trouble’ seems to fit the situation better. It is not obvious, however, whether the word shagged should be regarded as an adjective or a participle or a participial adjective, i.e. whether well really serves as an adjective intensifier. In (180) there is no doubt that it premodifies a regular adjective. Mandy and Don have come up with a brilliant idea of how to fill her tapes with recordings with as little effort as possible on Mandy’s part: (180) Don: Mandy: Don: Holly. Don: Mandy:
How many more tapes you gotta do? … Erm … four or five I think. Shit. (…) We’ll get some at the party tonight. ·laughingÒOh yeah that’ll be well funny / . ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Mine and Joel’s … erm mine and Joel’s idea of sticking the erm microphone in the toilet, yeah, Don: ·unclearÒ Mandy: ·laughingÒright·/Ò hiding it and then erm later on during the party yeah taking the tape yeah and telling everyone to be quiet and listen to it. [·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ] Don: [·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ] Holly: That’s a wicked idea. (134201: 22–31)
Table 6.11 gives an idea of the spread of the use of the premodifying intensifier well among the COLT teenagers. All in all, 23 of the COLT speakers have adopted the use of well as an adjective intensifier. Somewhat surprisingly, only three of them are girls,
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers
Table 6.11.The premodifying adjective intensifier well Example
Speaker
School borough
He’s gonna get well pissed off It’s well nice I was well drunk They look well nice He was well buggered You’re well shagged It’s well tacky That’ll be well funny I must have been well drunk I’m well arsed Well whippy He’s well nice I’m fucking well pissed off It was well funny Well wicked That’s well hard That’s well odd That was well nice Pierre got a well small dick They’re well nice It’s well good Well fit That’s well nice She goes well nice I’m always saying well cool Well stressed But you were well fucked off He was well pissed off I’ll bet he’ll be well pleased Your parents will be well pleased That was well funny But that was well funny Jack looks well wound up It’s well weird It was well funny …getting well stressed I bet he was well pleased I’m well pleased
Simon 14 Hackney Mandy 15 Hackney “ “ “ “ “ “ Alphie 15 Don 16 “ John 45 Hugo 13 Camden ? ? Callum 13 Camden Fredrick 13 Camden Tommy 14 Barnet “ “ “ “ “ “ Lionel 13 Barnet Carola 14 Barnet Carola 14 “ Anne 14 Jack 16 Hertfordshire “ “ Elliot 16 “ Rick 16 “ Jack 16 “ Les 15 “ Jack 16 “ “ “ Bradley 16 “ Elliot 16 “ Les 15 “ Ryan 16 “ Bradley 16 “ Nicolas 16 “ Jules 15 “ Pierre 15 “
Social class Text
Recruit
2 3 “ “ “
1 4 “ “ “ “ “ “ “ 15 “ “ 17 21 22 “ “ “ 25 26 “ “ 29 “ “ “ “ “ “ “ “ “ “ “ 30 “ “ “
1
2 1 2 “ “ “ 1 2 “ 1 “ “ “ “ “ “ “ “ “ “ “ “ “ “ “
132503 133703 134101 “ “ 133905 “ 134201 135802 137103 137104 “ 137803 139304 139403 139611 “ 139614 140402 “ 140810 140809 141606 “ “ 141705 “ 141706 “ 141709 “ 141802 141804 142004 142104 142105 “ 142106
Mandy, Carola and Anne. All three social classes are represented, but apparently with an overweight for speakers from class 1 and class 2. Moreover, Table 6.11
155
156 Trends in Teenage Talk
indicates that it is boys above all who have adopted this usage, none of whom have a class 3 background. The combinations of the intensifier well and intensified item used by the COLT teenagers are displayed in Figure.6.2, where the criteria used for distinguishing adjectives from participial adjectives are those suggested in Quirk et al. (1985: 404–405) for distinguishing adjectives from adverbs. We found that these criteria suited our present purpose quite well. Quirk et al. characterize adjectives as follows: a. b. c. d.
The can freely occur in attributive function They can freely occur in predicative function They can be premodified by the intensifier very They can take comparative and superlative forms
If these criteria are applied to the items premodified by well in COLT, we get the result as shown in Figure 6.2: Regular adjectives well
Participial adjectives cool drunk early funny good hard nice odd pleased stressed tacky weird whippy wicked
well
arsed buggered fucked-off pissed-off shagged wound-up
Figure 6.2.The adjective intensifier well in COLT
According to the criteria, only the items in the left column qualify as regular adjectives, while the items in the right column fall into the categories ‘peripheral’ (fucked-off, pissed-off, wound-up) and ‘marginal’ (arsed, buggered, shagged). However, due to the relatively few instances, it is difficult to arrive at a conclusion
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers
as to whether premodification by well is more or less restricted to very common adjectives such as good and nice or trendy adjectives such as cool and wicked. A comparison with the BNC, which was collected only slightly earlier than COLT in the 1990s, shows that the tendency to use well as a premodifier of a full-status adjective is very little reflected in adult conversation, where -ed words dominate: –
–
–
A search in the spoken part of the BNC, consisting of ten million words, gave no more than 18 hits, despite a total of 144,898 instances of well, which is equivalent to a mere 0.0001 per cent of the total occurrence, compared to .02 per cent in COLT A study of 1,000 randomly selected instances of well uttered by speakers aged up to 25 from the entire country resulted in five instances of the adjective/adverb intensifier well, which were all, it appeared, uttered by London teenagers A survey of 1,000 randomly selected instances of well uttered by adults aged 35 and upward from the whole country resulted in only three instances of well premodifying a regular adjective. The search gave the following result shown in Figure 6.3.
What distinguishes this list most noticeably from the COLT list (Figure 6.2) is that only -ed forms are represented. Three of the -ed forms, known, pleased and qualified, fulfil the criteria set up in Quirk et al. for ‘central’ (full-status) adjectives, since they accept all four criteria. The others do not. Managed and trailed, which do not satisfy any of the criteria, are defined as participles in the dictionaries, while the status of developed, removed stirred up is more uncertain.
Intensifier
Intensified
well
developed kept known managed pleased qualified removed stirred up trailed
Figure 6.3.The adjective intensifier well in the BNC
157
158
Trends in Teenage Talk
The fact that the teenagers use well as an intensifier also for full-status adjectives indicates that they are a step ahead of the adult speakers; the teenagers seem to treat well as an equivalent of very. That some of the teenagers are fully aware that this usage is not generally accepted is demonstrated in (181), where Jack, Bradley and Elliot discuss the language they use: (181) Jack: Bradley: Elliot: Jack:
My mum says, I go yeah that’s well nice. and she goes erm. she goes. well nice Oh [·nvÒlaugh·/Ò] [That’s it yeah I know] I’m always saying well. well cool and I keep saying that. I ‘ve said it like. about so many things when we’re home. and she goes. what is this you always saying well with everything
(141606: 31–34)
Jack’s mother is not thrilled by the way her son speaks, and all three boys apparently realize that their use of well is not accepted by the parent generation and probably not by society at large. The use of well as an adjective intensifier is not mentioned in Quirk et al. (1985) or in the recent, corpus-based, Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (1999); nor is it mentioned in The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998). Incidentally, the ‘traditional and accepted’ combinations well able, well aware and well worth/worthy are not used at all by the COLT teenagers. Dictionaries that do refer to the use of well as an adjective intensifier are, for instance, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1987: 1195), which refers to it as British English slang, with He was well fed up (‘extremely annoyed’) as an illustration, and Cambridge International Dictionary of English (1995: 1651), which illustrates it by well bored and well hard. However, this usage is far from a linguistic innovation, as testified by records in the OED (1989, Vol. XX: 117). The use of well as an adjective intensifier goes all the way back to Beowulf and the eighth century. And since the date given refers to writing, we can assume that it existed even earlier in the spoken language. What makes the London teenagers’ use of well in this function intriguing, despite the fact that they were not the first to use it this way, is that it fell out of use in the course of the 19th century and seems to have led a dormant existence until the late 20th century, when it was taken up again and revived in the London teenage talk. The most likely explanation for this revival, we think, is that the meaning of well has been watered down to such an extent that it is quite natural to use it with a variety of adjectives in analogy with well
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers 159
pleased, well known and well qualified, which have developed into full-status adjectives. And it is maybe not so surprising that it is among the London teenagers that this usage is first spreading. After all, they are the forerunners when it comes to the introduction of all sorts of slangy language (cf. Chapter 4). There are indications that this usage is spreading. Not only is it met with in oral and written interviews with adults but also in recent fiction, and it has even been observed in non-native teenagers’ writing in the form of well worthwhile, as reported by Lorenz (1999: 280), though this instance is perhaps not entirely convincing due to its close relation to well worth. 6.2.3.6The ‘dirty’ intensifiers bloody and fucking As Table 6.6 showed, the boys use the stronger intensifiers more often than the girls, both in terms of adverbs (extremely and completely in particular) and, more noticeably, in terms of taboo words (bloody and fucking). Consider (182) and (183): (182) He’s bloody mad, bloody potty, off his rocker. (133401: 14)
(183) Tommy:
Kieran: Tommy: Kieran: Tommy: Kieran: Tommy: Kieran: Tommy: Kieran: Tommy: Kieran: Tommy: Kieran:
She was rough man! He got fucking pissed too. ·nvÒsniff·/nvÒ Oh right who was the one who with short black hair yeah, cu= curly? Ah ·nameÒ No, not her. Her friend. Ah yeah I think it was Michele. Not short. How short is she? She weren’t short, I mean she had black hair yeah, to here yeah, [curly.] [I couldn’t], I couldn’t see anything anyway. [It’s a mile away somewhere.] [You were fucking going], ·laughingÒyou were going·/Ò Completely rough. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ You were going you going ah you cut me you cut me you cut, you cut me. You did cut me look! ·shoutingÒI didn’t [cut you.·/Ò] [You went] fucking [mad!]
160 Trends in Teenage Talk
Tommy: Kieran:
[It] was fucking Darren, you got the Fuck off!
(139614: 55–70)
In addition to peer group influence, one would suspect that not only gender but also age and social background (including residential area) and type of school (including school borough) would have an effect on the teenagers’ choice of intensifiers. This appears to be true only to some extent. Take Mandy, for instance, who has a working-class background and goes to school in Hackney, which is described as a rather mixed community. In (184) Mandy and Don are discussing ‘ragas’: (184) Mandy: They’re so bloody thick. They’re always saying that we dress like tramps yeah, then why do they wear clothes with holes in them? Don: ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ No man but they’re so fucked. Mandy: No ragas are fucking crap. Don: ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Yeah they are like … and like they cust don’t grow up until [the time ·unclearÒ] Mandy: [I know]. Don: I know, I’ve never seen a grown up raga actually. (134202: 410–415)
In (185) we meet some of the 16-year old public school girls, who can all be expected to have a good (upper) middle class and probably also educational background. Apparently, this does not seem to have an effect on their language with respect to their choice of intensifier: (185) Kate: Ryan: Tess:
He’s going out with Mary Oh [yeah.] [but I can’t,] I can’t, I don’t know what anyone actually sees in her. Kate: [She, I think she’s fucking ugly.] Ryan: [I ·unclearÒ] she’s fucking [nice] Norah: [Yeah.] Tess: Yeah quite ugly and [she, she used to] Norah: [As I said she used to] Tess: make her feet swing along ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Norah: [·unclearÒ] Kate: [my mum’s always going] oh I love their platform shoes, I mean they’re fucking rough, they can’t even walk in them.
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers
Many: Mm. (142305: 47–59)
What these two examples point to is that gender and social background do not necessarily have an effect on teenagers’ use and non-use of dirty intensifiers. Nor does the school environment. Age, too, was assumed to have an impact on the use of intensifiers, mainly as regards choice of item. A small-scale comparison between two subcorpora of 10,000 words each, recorded by 16-year old Jack and 13-year old Dylan at the public school, was expected to show that the 16-year olds used stronger intensifiers than the 13-year olds. The study gave a meagre result. What it did show was that Dylan and his friends limited themselves to the use of really (16 occurrences) with one exception, extremely (one occurrence), and that the range of intensifiers was more varied in Jack’s conversations, due to spread instances of perfectly, totally, completely, very and well. But here, too, really dominated (20 occurrences).
6.3 Summing up In the first part of this chapter, we showed that the non-standard grammatical features observed in COLT agree almost a hundred per cent with the observations that Cheshire made ten years earlier (Table 6.1), which indicates that there is not much grammatical change going on. This, in turn, is confirmed by Coupland (1988), who found that most of the non-standard features observed by Hughes & Trudgill (1979) were still typical of most urban British dialects, when he made his observations. Most of the non-standard grammatical features in COLT were observed in the working-class teenagers talk, i.e. class 3. In the second, and more extensive, part of the chapter, which dealt with adjective intensifiers, we showed that the items investigated are far less commonly used as adverb intensifiers than as adjective intensifiers, and that quite a few are not used as adverb intensifiers at all. We also showed that the COLT teenagers use adjective intensifiers represented by absolutely, completely, enough, extremely, totally, very and well far less frequently than the adult British speakers in the BNC. This does not necessarily indicate that the teenagers use adjective intensifiers less frequently than the adults generally speaking, but rather that their set of intensifiers is different. If the use of really and dirty words, for instance, were taken into consideration, we would probably get a very different picture.
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162 Trends in Teenage Talk
On the other hand, some of the intensifiers that adults use are hardly used by the COLT teenagers, items such as awfully, deeply, seriously, terribly and truly. All in all, the girls were found to use intensifiers significantly more often than the boys, but the distribution of items differs. The teenagers’ favourite intensifier, really, turned out to be used much more frequently by the girls than by the boys. The boys, on the other hand, were found to use the stronger intensifiers, represented by adverbs such as absolutely and completely and taboo words such as bloody and fucking, more often than the girls. The most interesting findings, we think, concern the use of four items, enough, real, right and well, as adjective/adverb intensifiers. Disregarding or maybe unaware of the standard usage, some of the teenagers place the intensifier enough before instead of in its usual position after the word it modifies (e.g. enough far); the adjectival form real is now being used in the adverbial function as an adjective intensifier on a par with really (e.g. real good); right appears as an adjective premodifier; and well is being used as an intensifier with a variety of adjectives and participial adjectives as an alternative for, or maybe a ‘stronger version’ of very. Occurrences of enough, real and right functioning as adjective/adverb intensifiers are few, while well is more common, but no conclusions as regards distribution can obviously be drawn on the basis of the present data. We can only sum up the main observations as follows: –
– – –
–
Enough in preposition occurs only in conversations involving teenagers with a lower middle class and working class background, mainly boys, and it tends to be accompanied by other features of non-standard language. Real is used by girls as well as boys from all social classes, but with a predominance for boys with an (upper) middle class background. The few instances of the premodifier right are only found in conversations involving (upper) middle class boys. Well, which has a larger distribution than the previous items, predominates in the boys’ conversations, particularly conversations involving boys with an (upper) middle class background. The use of dirty words as intensifiers could not be proved to be affected by speakers’ age and gender, nor by the school environment.
These observations might indicate that it is in fact teenage boys who are the forerunners when it comes to using enough, real, right and well as intensifiers in the manner described in this chapter, and that social class belonging has an impact on who chooses to use which item.
Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers 163
Regarding enough and right, the examples showed that there is a certain ambiguity as to scope, notably whether it encompasses the adjective alone or the adjective and the following noun, as in enough bad things and a right sad bastard. Judging by available sources, the use of real and right as intensifiers has been imported from American English, and judging by our (few) findings, it has mainly been adopted by (upper) middle class teenagers, and boys in particular. Finally, as we have shown, the use of well as an adjective intensifier and the placement of enough in premodifying position are very old phenomena, but what makes these usages intriguing is that, apparently, both disappeared before the end of the 19th century in order to emerge in today’s teenage language.
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Chapter 7
Teenagers’ use of tags
I keep saying ‘yeah’ after each, each sentence, when I’m describing something to my mum like saying last match yeah, we won yeah, six nil yeah, eight nil yeah, and I keep saying yeah, yeah, my mum’s going Ryan, 16
In this chapter we investigate what seems to be a common trend in teenage talk: the frequent use of tags. We are going to restrict the investigational scope rather a lot, however, by ignoring the otherwise highly common ‘ordinary’ tag questions that are found in English generally, as in the utterance She’s a nice girl, isn’t she?. Rather, we wish to focus exclusively on other types of use, namely those forms which can be described as invariant tags, as demonstrated by Ryan’s self-reported use of yeah in the utterance above. In London adolescent talk, invariant tags include at least five items, and we will be concerned with forms that may serve tag (as well as other) functions, namely eh, okay, right, yeah, and the recently observed invariant tag innit.1 The reasons for this
1.There are other invariant forms that may be used as tag questions, e.g. hunh? and not so?. The existing previous studies generally restrict themselves to brief mention of these items (e.g. Bolinger 1957; Dubois & Crouch 1975; Aijmer 1979; Holmes 1984; Quirk et al. 1985; Algeo 1988), exceptions being Millar & Brown (1979), Holmes (1982, 1995), Stenström (1994, 1997a), Norrick (1995) and Berland (1997). The inventory of invariant tags in English includes the items eh?, hunh?, okay?, kay?, right?, what?, yeah? and yes? in English generally, e? and e no? in Edinburgh Scots, eh what? in British English, not so? in Indian, Papua New Guinean and West African English and no? in varieties influenced by Spanish (Christian 1983). There is considerable regional variation in the use of the different forms. For instance, ‘hunh is common only in the United States and parts of Canada; eh is the counterpart of hunh in England, Australia and much of Canada’ (Norrick 1995: 689). The Scottish tag e must be distinguished from eh in other English dialects on both phonetic and functional grounds (Millar & Brown 1979: 31). Moreover, eh (especially with a falling intonation) ‘functions in New Zealand as an identity marker among young rural children and Maori adolescents in particular’ (Holmes 1982: 56; see also Holmes 1995: 97ff). And, according to Algeo, the tag eh what is ‘stereotypically British’ (1988: 174).
166 Trends in Teenage Talk
priority are several. First of all, it has been suggested that the use of invariant tags particularly common in the language of adolescents and, indeed, that this may be one of the universals of teenage talk (as suggested in studies such as Holmes 1982, 1995; Andersen 2001), but it remains to be seen whether this hypothesis can be supported by an inter-generational comparative study of Londoners. It is this task we will pursue in the current chapter. Secondly, we wish to give a general description of the different features of these five forms, both in terms of their quantitative/distributional properties, and in terms of their qualitative/functional properties. And thirdly, these are highly common items that have only to a certain extent been devoted attention in the literature. Innit has been given considerable attention after the COLT corpus was launched, due to its interesting ongoing development, grammaticalization and social spread, but the use of the other tags has not been discussed to the same extent. Hence we aim also to fill this gap in the current discussion. The following examples cover some of the uses that we have in mind when talking about these forms as ‘invariant tags’: (186) Yeah but the insurance company are probably gonna pay erm, sue me innit? (140802: 56)
(187) In fact you can have two. How about that then eh? Don’t touch! (132803: 266)
(188) Let me finish, okay? Oh wait, let me finish it first. (132803: 301)
(189) I have a plan right. I plan my homework this year start of the week I plan my homework, okay? See I’m gonna be able to say, right do that Saturday night. (132408: 60)
(190) My dad used to work erm know this bloke in the pub yeah, and this bloke used to like a pint of erm, oh I can’t remember, export bitter, yeah, I can’t remember what it’s like. Right? And there’s a little drop of lemonade yeah, right that’s what I like to drink, right? Oh yeah, and his dog yeah, liked it as well yeah, they used to leave a tray out for him every night yeah, when it was closing time the dog knew every time it closed. (132405: 1)
These utterances exemplify the variety of functions that can be attributed to tags in everyday conversation. They can be described from several perspectives, as having a subjective function, given that a tag may serve to reduce the speaker’s
Teenagers’ use of tags 167
commitment towards what was said (innit in (186)); as having an interactional function, given that a tag may serve to ask for the hearer’s evaluation of an opinion (eh in (187)), to check if the hearer is following in a narrative (right and yeah in (189) and (190)), or as a negative politeness device that softens a request (cf. okay in (188)); and as having a textual function, given yeah and right’s ability to chunk sequentially related pieces of information and to add to the structure of a narrative in (190). We wish to argue that tags are fundamentally interactional, as they always involve some sort of hearer-orientation; that is, they serve to involve the hearer in some way or other, although they do not always ask for or even allow for his contribution in the discourse (Holmes 1984, Andersen 2001). Hence, tags can be considered a subclass of discourse markers that have in common their interactional capacity, and in this chapter it is our aim to explore the functional plethora of these forms. However, our discussion in the following will show that not all items may serve the range of functions indicated here, and functional differences are addressed in the following section.
7.1 Why tags? Examples (186)–(190) above showed that tags are items that can be used for a variety of communicative purposes. They are typically interactional devices that are appended to a statement and that serve to engage the hearer or invite his response in the form of a confirmation, verification or corroboration of a claim, they may express a tentative attitude on the part of a speaker, or they may be polite expressions or signals of the common ground between interlocutors. (Cf. Hudson 1975; Millar & Brown 1979; Holmes 1982; Stenström 1984, 1994, 1997a; Algeo 1988, 1990; Norrick 1995; Stenström & Andersen 1996; Andersen, 2001.) Although tags commonly occur after a declarative statement, and seek some sort of support or evaluation of this statement from the hearer, they may also occur after interrogatives, as in (187), or imperatives, as in Imagine that, innit!. We will give a survey of the functions, exemplified by one of them, namely innit, before we contrast this tag with the other invariant tags that are the topic of this chapter. (Distributional properties in COLT and the BNC are discussed in Section 7.2.) 7.1.1
Functional plethora: The innit story
As may have become evident, the form innit is used in London adolescent speech as a tag that can be appended to any statement, regardless of the grammatical
168 Trends in Teenage Talk
features of the statement, hence its description as an invariant tag. The tag innit consists historically of a third person singular neuter pronoun and a form of the verb be (isn’t it). Andersen (2001) attributes its development to a process of grammaticalization, by which this form has undergone ‘invariabilization’, from a grammatically restricted use to a generalized use, as well as loss in semantic features and increase in pragmatic significance. This use of a form of be as an invariant tag occurs in other varieties of English, too, and typically in multilingual settings, although the form innit is usually described as a typical London (Cockney) feature, and occurs typically in the speech of ethnic minority youth. In order to recapitulate some of the findings made in Andersen (2001) regarding innit’s many functions, the survey in Table 7.1 may be useful.2 The table shows that a tag like innit can be used to address the truth or validity of the preceding statement (or proposition, hence the abbreviation P). This may occur either when the speaker is uncertain about something, as in the first example in the table (although this is the exception rather than the norm as far as the tag innit is concerned), or when s/he is certain but wants to hear the hearer’s opinion or belief on the same topic, as in the second example. A tag may also be used as a softener when there are conflicting views between the interlocutors, that is if a speaker has reasons to believe that the hearer does not hold the proposition to be true, but in an attempt to convince or remind him of it. This is what goes on in (191): (191) Dawn: That woman, she’s got the other Mothercare top that I’m gonna buy for Rolex and Jason for eight ninety nine and she’s selling it for one fifty. Isn’t that a screw but the only thing is erm she didn’t have Rolex’ size when I went there.
2.Other studies of innit can be mentioned. Stenström & Andersen (1996) conclude that, ‘[a]lthough innit is formally invariant, it appears to retain elements of grammatical features which it does not share with other invariant tags’ (1996: 199), hence that innit is gradually becoming an invariant tag in London teenage conversation. Tandberg (1996) presents data which support the main conclusions drawn in Stenström & Andersen (1996), and states that ‘[a]lthough it is reasonable to assume that the tag innit originated as a contraction of isn’t it, it does no longer seem plausible to regard these two tags as equal. …Even though innit can be used in connection with all subjects, it is clearly the most favoured subject, and is is the most favoured predicator’ (Tandberg 1996: 83). Erman‘s study ‘can be considered a followup to Stenström & Andersen‘s study’ (1996: 88). She argues that innit (along with just) is ‘in the process of being grammaticalized in teenage language’ and has ‘changed category membership from that of … tag question … to that of pragmatic particle’, specifically ‘emphasizer’ (1998: 87).
Teenagers’ use of tags 169
Table 7.1.Some functions of innit as a tag Example
Function
Label
1 You told mum yesterday innit?
2
3
4
5
6
The speaker is uncertain as to the epistemic truth of P and would like the hearer to verify it. Those old games, they’re so shit innit. The speaker believes that P is an facilitative opinion or belief shared by the hearer and herself, and that the hearer may wish to corroborate P. There’s only one Mothercare innit The speaker assumes that P is either softening Gwen. a shared belief, or at least compatible with the hearer’s background knowledge; therefore she tries to remind or convince him of P. Remember I’m walking with Ronnie The speaker assumes that P is a peremptory and Darren innit? shared belief, but it may be less salient in the hearer’s background knowledge; therefore she reminds him of P. S does not assume that P is a shared aggressive A: Got any new games for your belief, but believes that P is at least computer? B: No. It’s fucked innit? You must compatible with the hearer’s have fucked it up. background knowledge. It came out like a bullet innit! S does not assume that P is a shared imaginationbelief, but assumes that it is appealing compatible with the hearer’s background knowledge.
Gwen: What Mothercare was it? What Mothercare? Silvia: All I’m looking for [·unclearÒ] Dawn: [·unclearÒ] it’s wicked, there’s only one Mothercare innit Gwen. Gwen: But I mean there’s a lot of Mothercares you know Dawn. Dawn: Yeah but, look at him, looking like Deacon. Gwen: Who’s Deacon? (134902: 6)
There are apparently divergent views on the number of Mothercare stores that Dawn could have been referring to in her first utterance. Dawn’s second utterance expresses that Gwen’s question What Mothercare was it? is inappropriate, since it implies the existence of more than one Mothercare store. The
170 Trends in Teenage Talk
utterance appears to be aimed at convincing or reminding Gwen of this, and innit seems to serve as a persuasive softener in this context. In fact, tags may be used in contexts that are not as polite and friendly as the above, although they usually increase politeness rather than decrease it. Sometimes tags are peremptory; that is, they have hostile or challenging overtones: (192) Mother:
Tommy: Mother: Tommy: Mother: Tommy:
Mother: Tommy:
You know what I found you know you walk all the way round with your friends down the village when you come home. Yeah? When you get down at the other side there’s telephone, and I’ll come and [pick you up]. [What where] the park is? Not where the park, you go down at the village on the way down. Yeah but I’m gonna walk with Ronnie and Darren up to, bloody, down there. Remember I’m walking with Ronnie and Darren innit? Yeah, and I give you a lift up to here, ·unclearÒ. When you get the other side of the park, Yeah.
(139502: 11)
Tommy’s utterance is clearly a reminder, and his challenging tone towards his mother is actually underlined by a louder voice and a higher pitch in the tagappended utterance. The purpose of the peremptory tag is not to invoke politeness but the opposite, namely to ‘aggressively boost the force of a negative speech act‘ (Holmes 1995: 80). The unfriendly use of a tag is even clearer in those cases where the tag, which essentially asks ‘don’t you think’ or ‘isn’t that so’, is used in contexts where the hearer could not possibly know: (193) Kenneth: Cliff: Kenneth: Cliff: Kenneth: Cliff: Kenneth: Cliff: Kenneth:
So have you got anything new since I’ve been away? Dunno. Got any new games for your computer? No. It’s fucked innit? You must have fucked it up. Why what’s the matter with it? You know the little box that goes into the back of the telly? Yeah. He pulled the wires out. Who did?
Teenagers’ use of tags
Cliff: Kenneth: Cliff:
Rob Why? He’s a prick.
(135602: 23)
Because Kenneth has been away, he could not possibly be aware that Cliff’s computer is ‘fucked’, and it is obvious that the proposition represents new information to him. Cliff’s hostility is evident also from his unwillingness to cooperate when responding to Kenneth’s first question, and from the imminent false accusation that follows the tag. This shows that tags such as innit are not always part of acts of polite linguistic behaviour, but it may be the opposite. However, the use of the tag always implies hearer-orientation and it always displays the speaker’s inclination and willingness to take the hearer’s perspective and to draw him into the discourse, and it generally addresses the common cognitive background of the interlocutors. There is another use of innit that is also polite, despite the fact that it involves cases where it is only the speaker who is in a position to vouch for the truth of an utterance. This is the case when innit occurs in the midst of a narrative, such as when Susie in (194) is rendering what it is like to have a cold, or watching people who have a cold: (194) Susie:
Ryan: Susie:
Ryan:
I hate it when you walk past someone ·??Òtall·/Ò and they goes ·nvÒmimicking bringing up phlegm·/nvÒ right in front of you and you sort of give it … you don’t care if he’s ten feet tall you just look at him like this, and you see this nasty greeny. Well they got this erm, greenies! Look at my greeny! And they go ·nvÒmimicking bringing up phlegm·/nvÒ ·laughingÒI just look at them, I think it’s disgusting!·/Ò (…) But, I was walking down ·??Òthe street·/Ò and this Turkish man, scratching his nose and, listen, ·nvÒmimicking bringing up phlegm and spitting·/nvÒ in front of me, there’s me, ah ah what are you doing! He started talking to me ·unclearÒ ·unclearÒ [·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ] [Through his nose innit?] Listen, my cousin does, sometimes he goes, watch this … through his nose. There’s this big green thing come out of his nose! He simply went ·nvÒmimicking sound effect·/nvÒ through his nose there’s me wah! it come out like a bullet innit? Wisht! Like that. And this, this one was hanging ·unclearÒ
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Susie:
It’s nasty and they and they just get it off innit and tie a little knot ·unclearÒ. Cos I hate it when you see someone being sick.
(132707: 69)
In this type of use, referred to as ‘imagination-appealing’ (Andersen 2001), the main function of the tag seems to be to help the hearer envisage the events described. Innit has an interactional effect in this type of use also, since it activates and brings into focus a set of background assumptions that the speaker and hearer share. What the tag does is appeal to the hearer’s imagination of the events the speaker is describing. It is as if s/he is asking ‘can you imagine what I’m telling you now?’. This shows that tags are not always means of ‘asking for agreement’ or ‘asking for the hearer’s opinion’ about something, but should be described in more general terms as means for expressing a presumption of the interlocutors’ common ground. 7.1.2 The use of yeah as a tag Let us now consider how the other invariant tags behave in terms of functional properties. The first thing to be noted in this connection is that there is an important respect in which innit and other invariant tags, such as yeah, differ: (195) All it is yeah, is a project yeah that six peo= me and other five other people yeah in the school, were asked to do yeah, for a university which is studying ch= erm children’s language, yeah and what it’s like and basically I’ve got to carry it on me for a weekend yeah, record loads of different conversations on ten different tapes. (133701: 76)
(196) This geezer from Bedlam yeah got stopped the other day in this car yeah, he was pissed, he was tripping and he was speeding yeah, no MOT, no licence, no tax, no road insurance yeah (133905: 118)
This use of yeah as a tag (invariably pronounced with a rise) is common in our data, and has not been previously described in the literature, with the exception of some COLT-based studies. Basing her study on a 85,000-word subset of COLT, Berland (1997) shows that yeah, along with the other invariant tags okay, right and innit, is more frequent in working class than in middle class speech and that there were no significant differences between girls and boys with respect to the use of invariant tags. The use of yeah is also briefly mentioned in Andersen (2001).
Teenagers’ use of tags
The marker yeah has an interactional function; it is used as a device to check the mutualness of the concepts referred to and to help the hearer conjure up an image of what is being described. Used in this manner, yeah functions as a device for checking that the preceding subject noun phrase refers to a mutually manifest concept. It also seems to serve a textual function of chunking information units and structuring the utterance. In the examples above, yeah cannot be appropriately replaced by ordinary tag questions, nor by innit in some cases (cf. All it is yeah/*innit/*isn’t it…). The fact that innit derives historically from a negative present tense verb form imposes a restriction on its use: it always has to follow material that constitutes a complete proposition (e.g. On the tape she does that innit) or that can be enriched to a proposition (e.g. Wicked innit?). This shows that a tag such as yeah forces us to add an item to the list of possible tag functions presented above, namely the function of conceptretrieval helper. Another important functional property should also be pointed out, namely the fact that tags may have either a wide or a narrow scope: (197) You thought that was funny eh? (134802: 28)
(198) Cos my sister yeah, she wants to be responsible, she wants to be a scientist. (136405: 77)
The pragmatic markers eh and yeah (both pronounced with a rise) both invite the hearer’s evaluation of some aspect of the utterance. While eh in (197) has a wide scope that includes the whole proposition, You thought that was funny, the marker yeah in (198) has a narrow scope that is restricted to one propositional constituent, my sister. Due to this difference in scope, the tag eh in (197) is capable of addressing the truth of the proposition, while yeah in (198) is not. Specifically, yeah checks if the hearer is able to identify the person referred to as ‘my sister’. The difference in scope enforces two different interpretational procedures, one that is aimed at evoking the hearer’s assessment of truth and another that is aimed at assisting the hearer’s retrieval of a particular concept from memory, hence easing the process of reference assignment. Nevertheless, the two markers are closely related in function, in that they both address knowledge that is presumed to exist in the hearer’s cognitive environment. The question remains whether yeah as a tag can serve the other functions described in Table 7.1, or whether there are other functional differences at play. From our examples it is clear that yeah may in fact have a rather wide range of
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attitudinal functions. For example, it can be used as an epistemic tag to indicate the speaker’s uncertainty regarding the proposition expressed: (199) You’ve read this book called Roll Of Thunder, yeah? (133203: 471)
It seems that yeah functions just as well as innit and ordinary tags like haven’t you? as an expression of weak doubt. Similarly, there are examples where yeah serves to facilitate the talk of others, and is functionally equivalent to a tag like don’t you think?, which asks for the other’s opinion on a topic: (200) The twelve hundred’s good, yeah? (136320: 242)
Furthermore, there are examples where yeah acts as a softener, for example in a directive speech act: (201) Turn it down, yeah? (134602: 5)
This shows that yeah as a tag overlaps with innit’s functional range. However, there are major quantitative differences between the two tags discussed so far, as the vast majority of yeah-tags are used with imagination-appealing (202)–(203) and concept-retrieval helping (204)–(205) functions: (202) I done a wicked burp yeah, alright and I put it on my ghetto blaster yeah me and Nicky listened to it yeah, and it comes out wicked yeah, you just see the graphic equalizer going buuroing! (139506: 119)
(203) And then she had these these big baggy sort of trousers yeah, black, grey and white, then she had like black tights and red combat boots on. (133801: 149)
(204) The thing is our prom yeah is the day before so like, I’m gonna be pretty ·laughingÒfucked·/Ò (138905: 16)
(205) This guy yeah he falls in love with this woman, takes her to his apartment and slowly, he’s a surgeon and he slowly amputates all her arms and legs (138905: 60)
These examples represent a highly common usage, and it is very obvious that there is no speaker uncertainty involved. In the imagination-appealing use, the
Teenagers’ use of tags
speaker is using yeah to ‘ask’: Are you following my story? Are you able to imagine this?, and in the concept-retrieval-helping use he is checking if the hearer is ‘getting’ the preceding conceptual information. In fact, its function is very close in meaning to the discourse marker you know (what I mean); both these markers are indicative of the speaker’s presumption that the interlocutors’ cognitive background consists of mutual assumptions to the effect that the hearer is indeed able to imagine or visualize what is being described. Surprisingly little information is needed before the onset of the first yeah in an utterance; in fact a single constituent, for instance a personal subject or an adverbial, is all it takes for a yeah to occur: (206) Abdullah yeah he bought his computer after me and he didn’t get, he didn’t get more than half meg with it. (134602: 591)
(207) Right in school yeah, erm, after, they gave us these yeah, and they like wanna see like how we talk and all that. (139501: 11)
As a concept-retrieval helper, yeah may even occur in the middle of questions: (208) How can the thigh bone yeah, be strong and light at the same time? It’s hollow. (136403: 100)
Another important difference with respect to innit is that yeah, it would seem, is always used as a politeness device. No examples of the peremptory or aggressive uses were found. Judging by our data, then, it seems that yeah as a tag cannot be used to decrease politeness or to ‘cast the hearer into the role of ignoramus’ (Algeo 1988: 185), as is the case with ordinary tag questions and with innit. Moreover, it should be pointed out that the tag yeah has a wider syntactic distribution than other tags. For instance, as an epistemic tag it also occurs after interrogatives, where it would be harder to imagine the use of innit or an ordinary tag question like is it? or isn’t it?: (209) Is it a ninety minute yeah? (133705: 122)
(210) Is it still recording, yeah? (133905: 27)
The function of yeah when appended to a yes/no-question seems to be to be, interactively, to serve as a further urge for the hearer to respond, and, subjectively,
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176 Trends in Teenage Talk
adding conduciveness to the otherwise non-conducive yes/no-question. Interestingly, even a wh-question can be followed by yeah as a tag: (211) What do you mean yeah? (133202: 16)
(212) What would you say yeah if someone said that you were w= going out with erm, Henry? (136601: 665)
In this type of use, yeah does not add to the conduciveness of the question, as wh-questions are never conducive but always open, but the pragmatic function of yeah is apparently confined to urging the hearer to respond and to add to the overall directive force of the utterance. Finally, we have observed some cases where the main function of the tag seems to be to add a metacommunicative effect of asking simply ‘is it okay if I go on talking’: (213) Basically yeah. I mean it’s not like that important is it? I mean I already do enough ex= enough exercise. (140504: 235)
(214) ·laughingÒAnyway, yeah, and so·/Ò, right I go to Bunnie and I go can you take me home yeah cos I’m supposed to be going to a (139609: 131)
(215) Mm, I think she is. What happened was yeah, she got divorced, when she was fifty, with, my mum’s dad, and then she didn’t (142001: 299)
Here, there is no information that yeah can be said to ‘ask about’, since no conceptual information precedes the tag. Only a discourse marker precedes the tag in (213)–(214), while the preceding material is not a full proposition or a fully-fleshed concept in (215), but a wh-subclause whose meaning is as general as possible. The tag yeah is neither epistemic nor softening, but has a full interactional effect and hearer-orientation. This function can be labelled continuation-checking. 7.1.3 The use of eh as a tag The previous section may have given the impression that yeah always functions as a tag in teenagers’ discourse. This is not the case, of course, since the most common function is that of response signal. Like yeah, the item eh can perform
Teenagers’ use of tags 177
tag functions as well as non-tag functions. Generally it has other functions than that of tag. In adolescent conversation, eh? seems to be the most informal way of saying ‘I beg your pardon?’, but occasionally it serves hesitational functions (cf. I know but eh why isn’t it working?). But it is clear that eh, like yeah, can serve as an invariant tag used to express the speaker’s weak doubt, as in (216), or as a facilitative tag that asks for the hearer’s opinion, as in (217): (216) Rick’s already gone eh? (139604: 72)
(217) She’s so, so damn miserable eh? (135207: 2)
(218) Oh poor Paul eh? (142706: 429)
We note that the facilitative function includes cases such as (218), where a nonpropositional emphatic attitudinal expression precedes the tag. It is also possible to use this tag as a softener, which adds a more polite attitude to directive speech acts and mitigates the face-threat: (219) Yeah! Mm. Fill up eh! (142301: 93)
(220) Oh yeah? Sit on that eh. (142307: 538)
(221) No no no no. Let me stop, let me stop this. Eh? (140302: 58)
However, as with yeah, none of the impolite uses were found. Judging by our data, then, it appears not to be possible to use eh to indicate peremptoriness or aggression. Nor did we find any tokens where eh was used with imaginationappealing, concept-retrieving or continuation-checking functions. But one type of use should be mentioned, and that is eh in connection with ironical (222) or sarcastic (223) descriptions: (222) Woo ooh ooh! Private eh? Private! …(6) ·laughingÒExcuse me·/Ò! (132611: 149)
(223) You thought that was funny eh? (134802: 29)
In their respective contexts, the implications of these utterances seem to be that the thing talked about is not private and not funny, implications that would
178 Trends in Teenage Talk
apparently not be communicated without the tag eh. Finally, after yes/no-questions and wh-questions, eh can have the response-urging function discussed in connection with yeah above: (224) Are you going home tonight? Eh eh? (132614: 228)
(225) Come on, come on, what’s the tune do you know, eh? (134801: 20)
(226) Why are you bothered then? …Eh? (140602: 22)
In these cases, the main motivation for using the tag seems to be to increase the directive force of the utterance, and possibly also to add conduciveness to yes/no-questions. 7.1.4 The use of okay as a tag Used as a tag, okay has a slightly different set of attitudinal meanings than those discussed above. Its main tag function seems to be as a meta-communicative device for checking if the message came through to the hearer and if the hearer has any objections to what was said: (227) I’ll be down in about twenty minutes, okay? (139308: 200)
(228) I’m a Brixton man, okay? (132614: 130)
(229) I don’t know but he’s got one minute okay, cos you were working with Elli. Now what’ve you got? (140702: 129)
The main difference between okay as a tag, and those tags discussed so far is that the speaker expresses the proposition as an unquestionable fact in okay-appended utterances. These utterances are neither a request for the hearer to confirm the proposition nor a request for him to express his attitude towards the content of the proposition as such; this is clear from the fact that okay could not have been replaced by tags such as isn’t that so?, don’t you think?, won’t I?, aren’t I? or hasn’t he? in (227)–(229). In fact, it is not the epistemic meaning of the utterance that is captured by the tag okay. What it does is appeal to the hearer to consider the proposition as a proposal, regardless of questions of truth.
Teenagers’ use of tags 179
Therefore okay commonly follows a description of a hypothetical or potential state of affairs, and not as often an actual state of affairs, as illustrated in (230)–(231): (230) Look for your personal information you fat lump of lard you’re not you’re meant to ignore the microphone okay? (141102: 23)
(231) Next time you say it you really are gonna wake up in hospital okay? (141302: 12)
The tag okay, then, is not asking ‘isn’t it true that P?’ but rather ‘how do you feel about what I just said?’ or ‘P is the case and you have to take that into account’ or similar. This function can be described as proposal-evaluating. As a result of this common function, okay is found, in particular, when a speaker is giving instructions: (232) Next time you give it to me! Okay? (135207: 131)
(233) Barry. Don’t, don’t say nuffink to Wendy though right that you heard it. Okay? (135304: 11)
Again, there is a difference in the attitudinal implications from the other tags, since the tag okay does not really soften the directive in any way, as would be the case with tags like yeah, eh, will you?, or won’t you?, in contexts such as (232)–(233). This is due to the fact that okay is not an epistemic tag, and cannot contribute to making the content of the directive more tentative. However, some of its functions overlap with what has been previously described for the other tags. Like innit and yeah, okay is also very clearly used with imagination-appealing and concept retrieval functions, as in (234)–(237): (234) She was supposed to pick me up from work, okay? She didn’t have her car right so she goes, ·laughingÒto Bunnie, you can take her (139609: 119)
(235) I saw him, and I I had to walk past Pierre okay cos everyone else moved away, so I had to go ·laughingÒpast him·/Ò (140703: 39)
(236) I mean when I got, when I got here okay, er when I was in the lower sixth and I like sort of, got in and then like it was so weird (142304: 387)
180 Trends in Teenage Talk
(237) Well Sophie’s er bloody erm, allergic to alcohol and Heidi, she was so funny okay, she had, what, two Martini Rossos and she was fucked, totally. It was really funny. (142307: 26)
And it may have the continuation-checking function described in connection with yeah: (238) oh, oi, the thing is okay, did it, did erm, did, Lionel just suddenly like ask you out or did someone got you together? (136601: 755)
(239) yeah, but the thing is, okay, ·unclearÒ and then we can speak to him, and afterwards again, when I’ve finished erm, you know (136601: 18)
It can even be used with attitudinal statements. But after an attitudinal statement its function is not the same as with the previously mentioned tags to ask for the hearer’s view, but it seems rather a means to convince the hearer of the propositional meaning: (240) Hello this is Antonio again. Carola’s got nice hair okay? (140704: 24)
In other words, due to the absence of epistemic modality in okay-appended utterances, the tag conveys that ‘P is true and you’d better admit it’ or ‘you can’t argue against it’ or the like. Finally, it should be pointed out that this item can also have a variety of other functions, in particular as a response signal, of course, but also as a hesitational device (cf. Wh= er see that my sis=, eh a lot of the time my my sister like, okay my mum would phone up and). 7.1.5 The use of right as a tag Right behaves in ways that are similar to okay, but also to the other tags, and it can have a wide range of functions. For instance, right can be used to express the speaker’s slight doubt and reduced epistemic commitment: (241) Oh so hang on. You’re taping right? Well that’s. (132607: 233)
(242) Tiffany: No, he’s going out with wo=, a gi=, a woman called Keilly, right?
Teenagers’ use of tags
Susie:
Yeah. Right.
(132617: 109–110)
(243) Jean: I know it goes past the hospital. Right? Gwen: Yeah. (135004: 132–133)
It is clear from these examples that right can be used to ask for the hearer’s confirmation of a statement. Moreover, it can serve the other common tag functions, such as the facilitative function: (244) It’s better in the Duncan Arms than it is here right? (142306: 46)
Hence, right can also be used as a device for inviting the hearer’s opinion. Furthermore, it may function as a softener in face-threatening acts, such as directives: (245) See if it, whisper, whisper, right, whisper. Whisper from there, see if she can pick it up. (132606: 14)
(246) Don’t read it, just start. Don’t even bother stopping, right? Start! Don’t ca= (132607: 127)
(247) You see this? Get the microphone, right, turn the microphone (132901: 336)
Its function in these contexts is akin to ordinary tags, such as will you? or won’t you?, and the tag seems to make the directive more polite and less offensive. However, no tokens were found where right as a tag has peremptory or aggressive functions, which distinguishes it from innit and ordinary tag questions, but which puts it in the same class as yeah, right and eh. However, far more common are those tokens of right which function as concept-retrieval helpers, where its main function is to help the hearer to retrieve a concept from memory, and to signal mutual context: (248) Last year, right, I was on holiday in the South of France and I, I’d made friends with these two German people and I’m a bit wary (132901: 68)
(249) In that episode right she gets pregnant (132612: 94)
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(250) Granddad, who was looking after her died. I can’t, I just, I, swear, sort of God almighty, this man, right, he was a good eighty nine, right. And he (133203: 427)
Equally often, right serves as an imagination-appealer, particularly in narratives, as in (251)–(253): (251) You know what she done this morning? …She jumped onto my bed, right … ·laughingÒah, listen to this. Just listen right.·/Ò Lick the erm thing. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ No, she jumped on my bed and when she gets … and you’re just about to go to sleep and she goes ·nvÒpurring noises·/nvÒ so loud! And yesterday she jumped over the balcony right and Jones was sitting there. Jones went ·nvÒspitting cat noise·/nvÒ (132707: 36–38)
(252) There’s this man right and he’s married to this woman called Lorraine, but because he had, meanwhile he was married to a woman (132617: 107)
(253) When we used to sit with you in Humanities … sat next to you right, and I was saying like erm … erm, you were saying … I got you to say … so who are gonna bring down the school to beat me up? And (132610: 12)
This interactional function of asking ‘are you following my story?’ seems to be very common for the use of right as a tag, and it seems to have the same textual chunking function as commented on in connection with yeah. Furthermore, there are several examples where right is used with a response-prompting function after questions: (254) Oh shall I open it right? (132503: 665)
(255) Did you see what Simon did round there right? You know Rick being really cool? He had some Hoola Hoops and he crunched them all (132901: 19)
(256) You know what I found out, right? Hang on, wait a minute, er August, September, October, November, December, January, (132901: 193)
Given that it is more common that these questions are not responded to than that they actually are, we may ask if the speaker is genuinely trying to urge a response, but in some cases it may seem more as a metacommunicative
Teenagers’ use of tags 183
checking device that asks ‘is it all right if I go on talking?’. This is especially clear in (257)–(258): (257) I’ll tell you what I hate about him, right. Is the fact that out of a Madonna song this is he thinks he’s so much better (132913: 26)
(258) But the worst thing is right is old women trying to get on the train. It’s either walking (139201: 17)
It seems that we should not underestimate the metacommunicative, continuation-checking functions of a tag such as right. Finally, we found that right can even have the proposal-evaluating function that was observed in connection with yeah: (259) Look. He had the co= one computer right? (133202: 151)
(260) Yeah, but he didn’t need the modulator so he gave it to Obi because he’s got a monitor, right? And he’s now bought another (133202: 153)
Again, it should duly be pointed out that this item may serve a variety of nontag functions, among them that of hesitational marker (cf. Look my name’s, right, my name’s … Paul). This, in fact, makes right the most versatile of the invariant tags, as is also shown in the following section. 7.1.6 Survey of invariant tags and their associated functions It is now possible to give a survey that shows how the tags described in this chapter compare with respect to functional properties. This is shown in Table 7.2. The table shows that right is the most versatile tag, while okay is the one that has the narrowest set of functions. Moreover, an important generalization can be made, namely that invariant tags generally serve to increase rather than decrease linguistic politeness. This is clear from the fact that, with the exception of innit, invariant tags are not peremptory or aggressive; that is, they are not used for the purpose of belittling or ridiculing the hearer after statements where he could not possibly know whether or not the proposition is true. This adds support to previous claims regarding innit, which is a tag that has been shown to have an intermediate status between ordinary (canonical) tag and invariant tag (cf. Stenström & Andersen 1996; Andersen 2001).
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Table 7.2.Survey of tag functions
epistemic facilitative softening peremptory aggressive imagination-appealing concept-retrieval helping response-urging irony-marking continuation-checking proposal-evaluating
innit
yeah
eh
– – – – – –
– – –
– – –
– – –
okay
– – –
– –
– – –
– –
– –
– –
–
right
7.2 The distribution of tags in COLT We now address the issue of whether the use of invariant tags is a teenagespecific feature and whether particular groups of teenagers are in the forefront of this usage. From the outset, it should be pointed out that the teenagers themselves are metalinguistically aware of the common use of yeah as a tag, for instance, and extract (261) also indicates the teenage-specificity of this feature: (261) I wasn’t actually putting it on either, I said ·??Òsod weed·/Ò like that, and I’m, like that and I keep saying yeah, after each each sentence y=, when I’m describing something to my mum like s=, saying last match yeah, we won yeah, six nil yeah, eight nil yeah, and it I keep saying yeah, yeah, my mum’s going what are you doing? (141606: 28)
The current section, then, aims to add empirical support to the assumption that there are observable differences between teenagers and adults in this respect. The overall distribution of the items discussed is as seen in Table 7.3: Table 7.3.Survey of overall tag distribution
tags total number of tokens tag percentage
eh
okay
right
yeah
innit
74 257 28.8
192 861 22.3
290 1751 16.6
728 7303 10.0
323 362 89.2
Teenagers’ use of tags
We note that, with the exception of innit, all of these items are used more often with other functions than the tag function, and that yeah is the most common of all invariant tags, while eh is the least common. 7.2.1 Age The tags we are studying in this chapter are distributed across the COLT age groups as seen in Table 7.4. In this and the following tables, the relative frequencies are given per thousand words of uttered text for each speaker group in the rightmost marker column. Table 7.4.Survey of tag distribution according to speakers’ age eh Preadolescence (0–9) Early adolescence (10–13) Middle adolescence (14–16) Late adolescence (17–19) Young adults (20–29) Older adults (30+)
1 16 34 9 0 8
okay 0.54 0.17 0.14 0.24 0.00 0.35
0 37 84 14 0 2
right 0.00 0.38 0.35 0.38 0.00 0.09
0 45 197 24 2 8
yeah 0.00 0.47 0.82 0.65 1.76 0.35
1 141 447 73 2 13
innit 0.54 1.46 1.86 1.99 1.76 0.56
0 75 202 33 2 4
0.00 0.78 0.84 0.90 1.76 0.17
In order to make these data easier to interpret, we have visualised the distribution by means of Figure 7.1. Table 7.4 and Figure 7.1 show unequivocally that the use of invariant tags is not evenly distributed across the age groups in COLT, but varies considerably and systematically. With one exception, the use of tags drops off dramatically after late adolescence or young adulthood. This is evident, regardless of whether we compare absolute or relative figures. For two of the tags, innit and right, there seems to be an increase after age 16 and into young adulthood, but this observation is unreliable, due to the low overall rate of contribution from young adults in COLT. What we can clearly see is that the use of invariant tags is considerably higher among the teenagers than among the other age groups. This is particularly the case as regards the most frequent tag, namely yeah, whose distribution increases towards late adolescence. As regards innit, okay and eh, the frequency of use remains stable throughout adolescence, while right seems to have its peak in middle adolescence. The only tag that does not follow the general pattern of teenage-specificity is eh, which is more frequent among the adults than among the teenagers. This is interesting, and may be seen as an indicator that eh is a more traditional invariant tag. In fact, eh has previously
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186 Trends in Teenage Talk
been described as a conventional irony marker (cf. Wilson & Sperber 1993), but it is possible that this subtle usage is a phenomenon that is generally confined to adults, and that it increases as the teenagers grow older and become more rhetorically mature. On the other hand, it may be that eh is currently on its way out, as it were, and is being replaced by the other invariant tags that thrive in the talk of present-day teenagers. This trend is also clear if we compare with the relevant figures for BNC/ London, as shown in Table 7.4. A comparison with Table 7.3 above reveals that every single tag item in COLT massively outnumbers its correspondent in BNC/London. However, we note that all five items do occur as tags in this adult corpus too, but only rarely so. The forms are also much more frequent overall in COLT than in BNC/ London. For instance, the form okay is six times as common, innit three times as common and yeah twice as common, while eh and right are slightly more common in COLT. This general difference in frequency must, to a great extent, be ascribed to the use of these forms as tags, as described in the previous section, but it also seems that the use of pragmatic markers at a more general level are more common in the adolescent speech.
2.50 2.00 1.50 1.00 0.50
Pr ea do les ce nc e Ea rly ad ol es ce nc M e id dl ea do les ce nc e La te ad ol es ce nc e Yo un ga du lts O ld er ad ul ts
0.00
Figure 7.1.Distribution of invariant tags according to speakers’ age
eh okay right yeah innit
Teenagers’ use of tags 187
Table 7.4.Survey of overall tag distribution in BNC/London
tags total number of tokens tag percentage
eh
okay
right
yeah
innit
41 260 15.8
19 150 12.7
34 1595 2.1
15 3874 0.3
97 106 91.5
In sum, the claim that invariant tags are a feature that thrives in the communication between adolescents is supported by these findings. 7.2.2 Gender As regards gender differences, the tags behave differently, as is clear from Table 7.5 and Figure 7.2: Table 7.5.Survey of tag distribution according to speakers’ gender eh
okay
Female 36 Male 36
0.17 0.16
77 110
right 0.36 0.48
146 140
yeah 0.68 0.61
269 440
innit 1.25 1.91
192 128
0.90 0.56
2.5 2 1.5
female male
1 0.5 0 eh
okay
right
yeah
innit
Figure 7.2.Distribution of invariant tags according to speakers’ gender
188 Trends in Teenage Talk
We note that the tags eh, okay and right display no significant gender difference in their distribution, while yeah and innit do. The tag innit is mainly a female phenomenon, while yeah is typically a ‘boys’ thing’. Hence, we cannot claim without modification that the use of (invariant) tags is more frequent among girls than among boys, but the different items that may serve this function must be considered separately. 7.2.3 Social class The distribution according to social class is shown in Table 7.6 and Figure 7.3: Table 7.6.Survey of tag distribution according to speakers’ class eh High (1) 11 Middle (2) 23 Low (3) 10
okay 0.14 0.34 0.13
34 26 20
right 0.42 0.38 0.25
24 32 52
yeah 0.30 0.47 0.65
98 157 118
innit 1.22 2.31 1.48
10 67 152
0.12 0.99 1.90
2.5 2 1.5
high (1) middle (2) low (3)
1 0.5 0 eh
okay
right
yeah
innit
Figure 7.3.Distribution of invariant tags according to speakers’ class
No clear social patterning can be observed, but the tags vary individually according to the social class parameter. However, innit very clearly follows the traditional distribution of non-standard features; that is, it is most common
Teenagers’ use of tags 189
among the lower class speakers. This is not surprising, given that this tag involves a non-standard use of an originally third person singular neuter pronoun. Right follows the same pattern, but the effect of the social difference is much less significant. Okay is distributed evenly across the three social classes, while eh and yeah follow an atypical pattern of variation in which it is the middle group that has the highest percentage of use. Hence, it is difficult to draw overall conclusions as regards the effect of socio-economic differences on the use of invariant tags. 7.2.4 Ethnicity The ethnicity factor is slightly more problematic to evaluate, because the rate of contribution of the two ethnicities is not known. For this reason, only the absolute figures could be calculated, and these are given in Table 7.7 and Figure 7.4: Table 7.7.Survey of tag distribution according to speakers’ ethnicity
Ethnic minority White
eh
okay
right
yeah
innit
16 14
15 51
56 29
181 176
169 51
200 180 160 140 120
Ethnic minority
100
White
80 60 40 20 0 eh
okay
right
yeah
innit
Figure 7.4.Distribution of invariant tags according to speakers’ ethnicity
190 Trends in Teenage Talk
Table 7.7 and Figure 7.4 show that two of the tags, eh and yeah, have a remarkably similar distribution with respect to the ethnicity parameter. Right and innit, on the other hand, are predominantly ethnic minority features, while okay is more common in the talk of white speakers. This shows that, as regards ethnicity, we cannot claim that the use of invariant tags is restricted to one particular ethnic group, but the different markers must be considered individually. 7.2.5 Location Finally, it remains to be seen whether the use of tags is confined to speakers from a particular borough. The distribution is shown in Table 7.8 and Figure 7.5: Table 7.8.Survey of tag distribution according to borough of conversation eh Hackney Tower Hamlets Camden Barnet Hertfordshire
24 3 10 22 15
okay 0.18 0.09 0.16 0.34 0.12
47 18 36 29 62
right 0.35 0.52 0.59 0.44 0.49
153 33 13 64 27
yeah 1.14 0.95 0.21 0.98 0.22
231 27 142 136 192
innit 1.71 0.78 2.32 2.07 1.53
198 19 48 37 8
1.47 0.55 0.78 0.56 0.06
Again, it is difficult to point towards any systematic pattern of variation, but we note that Hertfordshire ranges lowest or second lowest in terms of tag usage.
2,50 2,00 eh okay right yeah innit
1,50 1,00 0,50 0,00
Hackney
Tower Hamlets
Camden
Barnet
Hertfordshire
Figure 7.5.Distribution of invariant tags according to borough of conversation
Teenagers’ use of tags
Tower Hamlets also has a generally low percentage, but this may be an effect of the fact that many of these conversations include adult speakers (cf. Chapter 2). The tags eh and okay are remarkably evenly distributed, while the other tags vary considerably. Innit follows the expected pattern, as it is least common in the higher-class area Hertfordshire, while the differences in the distribution of right and yeah seem be more or less arbitrary. Hence, we cannot claim without modification that invariant tags follow clear patterns of variation as regards the location parameter.
7.3 Summing up In this chapter, we have shown that the use of invariant tags is a highly common characteristic of teenage talk, more so than of the language of adults. Moreover, the number of items that may serve this function is high, and tags are used with a wide range of subtly different functions. The functional range includes such uses as the imagination-appealing, concept-retrieval helping, response-urging, continuation-checking and proposal-evaluating functions, in addition to the more familiar epistemic, softening etc. functions. We have also shown that, with the notable exception of the age parameter, the use of invariant tags does not always follow clear sociolinguistic patterns, but that each item must be considered separately with respect to such social parameters as gender, ethnicity, class and location. Finally, the use of eh as a tag follows a different pattern of variation than the rest of the tags, as it appears to be more common in adult talk.
191
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Chapter 8
Ritual conflict
I want a fight on tape. Susie, 14
This chapter deals with conflict talk in COLT, showing how the recruits sometimes use language to fight verbally among themselves. The account is largely based on Hasund (1996) and Hasund & Stenström (1997). In contrast to the previous chapters, it is more qualitatively oriented, focussing on the communicative strategies used by speakers in larger stretches of speech, as well as the interrelation between conflict talk and the non-linguistic variables gender, race and social class. Let us begin by looking at a passage recorded by Susie, a black, workingclass girl from Hackney. In (262), Susie meets Melanie, a private college student, and decides to make a mock interview with her about life at college. In only a few seconds Susie manages to display all her prejudice towards people of Melanie’s sort — posh, sensitive and deadly dull: (262) Susie: Melanie: Susie:
Melanie: Susie: Melanie: Susie: Melanie: Susie:
Was there any fights? No ·unclearÒ Mind you, I don’t suppose you get many fights at college because ·mimicking refined accentÒthey all talk like that.·/Ò You know? ·mimicking refined accentÒAnd they all walk about and sit in circles·/Ò ·nvÒscream·/nvÒ ·shoutingÒyou didn’t have an argument with a teacher or anything interesting?·/Ò No.. I had an argument yesterday Who with? Let’s hear it. …·mimicking a man’s voiceÒTalk to me baby.·/Ò ·unclearÒ Yeah, who with? Tell us the argument. What was it about? Oh because one of the typewriters is broken and she blamed it on me. So what did you say to her? ·shoutingÒ‘Hey, bitch’?·/Ò No, sorry, what did you say?
194 Trends in Teenage Talk
Melanie: Susie: Melanie: Susie:
No she just goes ‘who did it’ and she started looking at me and I said ‘What are you looking at me for?’ What teacher was this? Miss S ·nameÒ Stupid co= ·laughingÒMiss stupid cow!·/Ò
(132703: 18–30)
The example provides us with an interesting sociolinguistic judgement: according to Susie, private college students do not fight because they talk ‘like that’. Susie, however, makes it clear that she does not talk ‘like that’ and that she knows how to fight. In fact, she seems to enjoy stirring up arguments in order to get ‘fights on tape’, mainly just for fun and to show off her verbal skills. Susie’s playful fights are examples of a verbal activity which is called ‘ritual conflict’, and which is the focus of the present chapter. Ritual conflict can be defined as playful, non-serious verbal disputes that are not aimed at conflict resolution (cf. Grimshaw 1990). The most well-known form of ritual conflict is ritual insult, a kind of verbal duelling in which speakers exchange insults about each other or each other’s relatives — most importantly, the opponent’s mother — in a series of reciprocal counters. Ritual insult is an activity primarily found among black, working-class boys (cf. Labov 1972; Kochman 1983). One important aspect of ritual insult is the element of competition: the insult sequences are performed in the presence of an evaluating audience of other peers, and the participants use their verbal skills to compete for rank in the status hierarchy of the group. (263) is one of the many and lengthy ritual insult sequences recorded by Wyatt in Tower Hamlets (cf. 3.1.4): (263) Will: many: Will:
Wyatt: Joe: Wyatt: Joe: Wyatt:
Your Mum can’t afford toilet paper, she has to slide down the banisters. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ And listen! And your Mum can’t afford toilet paper for her pussy, so when she slides down the banister it says like blurgh, la blah la blah loo ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Your Dad uses a plastic bag for a condom. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ At least my Dad can afford plastic bags, that’s all I’m saying. My Dad uses ·laughingÒDurex’s·/Ò. Yeah, but your Dad’s Durex’s is it got holes in the top so that’s a sly way of getting babies.
(135805: 85–92)
Ritual conflict 195
As the participants in insult exchanges seek to maintain and aggravate opposition, an insult sequence can go on at length. According to Kochman (1983), who has studied ritual insult (or signifying) among black males in Chicago, what participants do when they engage in ritual insult is to push each other to the limits in order to expand their capacity to endure. Children who engage in ritual insults thus learn to interpret and respond to insults in a playful, nonserious manner. By developing self-defence strategies and competitive skills, Kochman (1983) holds, they become more able to defend themselves in social interaction in childhood, and later in adulthood. In this chapter, we will not focus on the ‘core’ type of ritual conflict, the competitive ritual insult among black, working-class males. We will rather focus on some types of ritual conflict which have not been given much attention in the literature, namely girls’ ritual conflict and ritual conflict which is not primarily competitive in nature. We found that some of the black, working-class girls in COLT did participate in ritual conflict, though of a different kind than the ‘classical’ ritual insult. We also found that, although the girls’ ritual conflicts were not primarily competitive in nature, they nevertheless seemed to contribute to developing a number of self-defence strategies and verbal skills, as does ritual insult. Similar findings have been reported for American English in Goodwin’s (1983) study of peer group interaction among black, working-class boys and girls in West Philadelphia and in Eder’s (1990) study of the interaction between white middle-class and working-class girls in a mid-western middleschool. Thanks to the COLT girls from Hackney, we are now able to give evidence for British English, too.
8.1 Gender, class and race There is a small, but growing body of literature on ritual conflict which focusses on the correlation between ritual conflict and social factors. The three factors that seem to be the most salient are gender, social class and race (see Hasund 1996 for an overview). As regards gender, one of the findings most often referred to is that males tend to engage in direct and competitive verbal disputes, whereas females seem to prefer a more indirect and cooperative approach. Some girls do engage in direct verbal disputes. However, the competitive element seems less important than in the boys’ disputes, and girls do not seem to be negotiating rank or evaluating ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ to the same extent as boys do (cf. Eder 1990).
196 Trends in Teenage Talk
The notions of competitive-direct versus cooperative-indirect also relates to social class. According to Labov (1972), who studied ritual insult (or sounding) among black, working-class boys in Harlem, reference to middle-class norms is important to understand and evaluate ritual insults. Mainstream middle-class society values cooperation and indirectness in conflict talk, and an important aspect of sounding is the deliberate opposition to these values. As Labov puts it: ‘Many sounds are “good” because they are “bad” — because the speakers know that they would arouse disgust and revulsion among those committed to the ‘good’ standards of middle-class society’ (1972: 324). Eder (1990) found that the girls from middle-class backgrounds were less likely to engage in direct, competitive disputes, preferring to negotiate shared meaning through cooperative strategies. Direct, confrontational disputes, such as ritual conflict, were found to be more common among the girls from working-class backgrounds, ‘where ‘toughness’ is more highly valued and there is less concern about ‘politeness’ ‘(1990: 82). Finally, race is a factor which seems to be highly salient in studies of ritual conflict (see e.g. Schofield 1982; Heath 1983; Eder 1990). Particularly among females, ritual conflict creates a gap between black and white: black females have often been reported to be skilled in ritual conflict, and they find being able to defend themselves from verbal attacks appropriate and necessary in many situations. White females, in contrast, tend to find such behaviour inappropriate and ‘unfeminine’. Consequently, they develop less ritual conflict skills, or, at least, they are reluctant to report knowing them. White females are often intimidated by what they see as the tougher, more aggressive style of black females. These are sweeping generalizations; however, they are based upon very important stereotypes, which function as navigation points and provide speakers with resources and models for language behaviour. In COLT, we see very clearly how the speakers relate to and play with these language stereotypes. The material confirms that the teenagers do draw a broad and important dividing line between the competitive and direct ‘toughness’ associated with being black, working-class and male on the one hand, and the cooperative and indirect ‘politeness’ associated with being white, middle-class and female on the other. Of course, not all factors may be activated simultaneously, and factors may crosscut each other. In (262), Susie activates one social divide by doing what Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (1995) call ‘labelling’: by focusing on the differences between her own style and that of Melanie, Susie labels both herself and Melanie as members of different ‘communities of practice’. That the black Hackney girls in COLT separate themselves from white,
Ritual conflict 197
mainstream (middle-class) culture is particularly evident in some of Susie’s recordings, where she and her friends talk about race (cf. 3.1.9). Consider (264), where Allie describes another girl as a typical ‘white man’s woman’: (264) Allie: Kate: Allie:
she’s sort of really naive and really Gets on my nerves sometimes. I’m not being funny, but she’s a white man’s woman, don’t you think so? Susie: Yeah. Kate: She, she’s all Sharon: Very dependent. Susie: Yeah. Allie: Very Susie: ·mimicking woman’s light voiceÒOoh Alan, ooh Alan!·/Ò Allie: She, she’s everything men want women to be, you know. Susie: She’s pathetic.
(132901: 96–106)
8.2 Data and methodology In the following sections, we will present some examples of ritual conflict among the girls in COLT (for a more exhaustive description, see Hasund 1996). For our (largely qualitative) analysis of conflict talk, we selected a subcorpus of COLT consisting of the recordings of four female recruits, thirteen to sixteen years old, two from middle-class backgrounds (Chelsea and Rebecca) and two from working-class backgrounds (Susie and Gwen). The subcorpus consists of approximately 40,000 words of conversations between the recruits and coparticipants that were a) female, b) identified as friends of the recruits in the log books, and c) of approximately the same age as the recruit with whom they interacted. As we do not have systematic information about race for all speakers, we could not control for this factor. Social class was controlled for, and there is an equal amount of material from the recruits from the highest and lowest social categories, i.e. 20,000 words from the girls from class 3 (working class) and 20,000 words from the girls from class 1 (middle class). In this chapter, however, only the working-class girls’ appear, for the simple reason that they are the only ones in COLT who participate in ritual conflict. The theoretical framework draws on Conversation Analysis (CA) and interactional sociolinguistics. CA was used for the micro-level analysis of the
198 Trends in Teenage Talk
communicative strategies used by speakers to deal with conflict talk, and interactional sociolinguistic methods were used for the macro-level analysis of the social distribution of conflict strategies. As regards the micro-level analysis, we focused on the communicative strategies used by the speakers in their verbal disputes. Speakers generally have two strategies available to deal with conflict talk, mitigating or aggravating strategies. We will give a brief definition and description of these categories before we present the results from our data analysis. 8.2.1 Mitigating strategies Linguistically, cooperation and indirectness in conflict talk are expressed through mitigating or face-saving strategies by which the speaker makes an effort not to offend her opponent. Competition and directness, on the other hand, are seen as related to the use of aggravating or self-attentive, face-threatening strategies by which the speaker opposes another in a direct and potentially offensive manner. Of course, mitigation and aggravation do not exist as dichotomised entities, but rather as extremes on a scale going from more mitigating (i.e. indirect/cooperative) to more aggravating (i.e. direct/competitive) strategies. Following Brown (1980), Eisenberg & Garvey (1981), Jefferson (1984), and Sheldon (1992), we define mitigating strategies as face-saving, other-attentive strategies which express the speaker’s sensitivity to her opponent by being softened and modified so as not to create offence. As direct opposition is frequently considered a dispreferred activity (i.e. one that is conventionally avoided), the establishment of an opposition is generally performed in an environment of mitigation, and is ‘variously softened and made indirect’ (Atkinson & Heritage 1984: 53) as an indication that the speaker is reluctant to disagree with what the first speaker has said. Expressions of disagreement are frequently marked as dispreferred by one or more mitigating devices, or markedness features. A speaker may for instance delay opposition to indicate that she is reluctant to openly disagree with the opponent. She may do this by using the ‘no talk’ strategy, i.e. pausing before expressing opposition. She may use a softener, such as well…; yes, but…; I don’t know, but… as preface to disagreement, showing that she is reluctant to express opposition (Pomerantz 1984). Or she may give an account, for instance by making clear that there are external demands forcing her to oppose, or that she is unable to perform a certain task she has been given (Labov & Fanshel 1977). Another mitigating strategy is to use humour.
Ritual conflict 199
Through various keying mechanisms such as smiles, laughter, and joking, speakers can express opposition indirectly. The humour mode, because it is indirect and allusive, ‘protects the joker from the consequences that his or her statement would have if conveyed directly in the serious mode’ (Crawford 1995: 134). In ritual conflict, the use of humour is in fact what defines the activity as ‘ritual’ as opposed to personal or serious (Labov 1972; Kochman 1983; Maynard 1985; Eder 1990; Sheldon 1992). 8.2.2 Aggravating strategies On the other end of the scale, there are aggravated forms of conflict talk. Competition and directness in oppositional discourse is linguistically expressed in terms of face-threatening, self-attentive strategies by which the speaker expresses opposition in a direct, unmitigated, and potentially offensive way (cf. Goodwin 1980; Brown 1980; Eisenberg & Garvey 1981; Jefferson 1984; Sheldon 1992). Speakers have various strategies available for the construction of aggravated conflict talk. Generally, aggravated conflict strategies are mainly negatively defined as strategies that are not marked as mitigated. These can be summarised as follows: –
–
–
– –
Stated, strong, and direct opposition, i.e. opposition which is not partial (as in agreement-plus-disagreement constructions), not delayed (there is no pause before the expression of disagreement) and not prefaced (not preceded by softening devices such as uh or well (Atkinson & Heritage 1984; Pomerantz 1984). Aggravating accounts, which point to the speaker’s own decisions and desires rather than some externally imposed demands, e.g. I don’t want to! (Goodwin & Goodwin 1990; Labov & Fanshel (1977). Directives, such as telling the opponent to go away or shut up. Shut up, for instance, projects opposition as non-negotiable and demands that the opponent cease opposition by not repeating the arguable utterance. Directives are constructed as direct orders and are not mitigated by being constructed (‘disguised’) as questions or accompanied by politeness words such as please (Goodwin 1993). Critical evaluations, which directly express a negative judgement of prior speaker’s turn (Goodwin 1993). Insults and challenges, of which ritual insult is one subtype (see Labov 1972; Lein & Brenneis 1978; Kochman 1983; Eder 1990; Sheldon 1992; Goodwin 1993).
200 Trends in Teenage Talk
Ritual conflict is a special type of conflict talk, in that it is simultaneously aggravated and mitigated. The speaker will use one or more strongly aggravated strategies, while at the same time mitigating the effect of the utterance by displaying it as non-serious, i.e. performed in the ‘pretend frame’ or ‘play frame’. As we shall see, establishing and upholding the pretend frame is not entirely unproblematic, neither for the speaker nor the listener.
8.3 Ritual conflict in COLT 8.3.1 Tough girls’ talk As mentioned, the only instances of ritual conflict in the subcorpus were found among the two black girls from Hackney. These girls showed impressive skills in arguing playfully. From a middle-class perspective, their language and interactional style could be considered both rude and assertive. Susie and Gwen both seem to enjoy displaying verbal and emotional toughness, ‘performing’ disputes in front of the recorder. Of course, when one sees how able they are to answer back when verbally attacked, this is no surprise. Their quick and clever responses give the impression that they have long practice in dealing with ritual conflict talk, and also that they are clever and intelligent girls (cf. Eder’s (1990) claim that insulting skills may give an impression of intelligence and wit)). In the conversations recorded in Gwen’s home, we get the impression that family members are drilled in the art of ritual conflict from early childhood (cf. 3.3.2). In (265) it is Silvia, Gwen’s two-year-old sister, who is taught by her sister Courtneyde: (265) Courtneyde: Silvia: Courtneyde: Silvia: Gwen:
Get lost. Get lost. Get ·unclearÒ You’re dirty dog. You’re dirty dog. Get lost. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ
(135201: 3–10)
Susie, too, seems to have a lot of practice in defending herself from verbal attacks (as well as physical; cf. 3.1.8). Notice, for instance, how she counters Kathy’s attack in (266): (266) Kathy: Susie I really think you should wash your hair because there’s all lice running along ·laughingÒthe table·/Ò.
Ritual conflict 201
Susie: Do you want one? Kathy: I’m not a monkey. I don’t really wanna go ·laughingÒfor you·/Ò Susie: (imitating a monkey)·mimickingÒOoh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh·/Ò. Kathy: No! Get over there. Susie: ·mimickingÒAh ha, ah ha, ha ha ha ha ha·/Ò! Kathy: You’re mad! (132607: 305–314)
Instead of being offended because someone has suggested that her hair is so dirty that it is full of lice, Susie answers back with a comment that is even more offensive. The question Do you want one? suggests that Kathy should be a monkey, and it is this implication Kathy denies in the following turn. In (267), Gwen performs a brief fight with Anita (a girl in her class), and in (268), Susie and Gwen together demonstrate their ritual conflict skills: (267) Anita: Gwen: Anita: Gwen: Anita: Anita: Gwen: Gwen: Anita:
What? ·shoutingÒ Gwen don’t record me right. ·shouting + laughingÒ Shut your mouth Anita. ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ You’re recording [·unclearÒ·/Ò.] [Shut your] fucking mouth·/Ò. … ·unclearÒ recording there (…) ·shoutingÒYou bitch·/Ò! (…) Yeah The mike ain’t, the mike’s gone again ·unclearÒ. ·blowing into microphoneÒ (3) Testing, testing one two three.
(135001: 4–12)
(268) Gwen: Susie: Gwen: Susie: Gwen: Susie:
Are you taping? (…) (…) I’m taping you right now Gwen. Are you? Yes I am darling. ·shoutingÒYou fucking tape me [you dirty cow?] [·shoutingÒYes I fucking] I am you dirty [cow!] Gwen: [Fucking] Susie! [You fucking slag] Susie: [Don’t you fucking] start with me Gwen: You are!·/Ò. Susie: You dirty slag!·/Ò Gwen: ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Sharon: ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ
202 Trends in Teenage Talk
Susie:
It hasn’t, hey it’s not, well I ain’t even finished this side.
(132611: 11–24)
In both examples, the opponent counters an offensive move by one that is equally or more offensive, eliciting lengthy sequences of insults and counterinsults or challenges and counter-challenges. The oppositional directives, insults, challenges and swear-words mark the sequences as aggravated. Still, both sequences are obviously playful performances and not serious or personal conflict exchanges. As soon as the ‘let’s record a fight’ frame has been established, the participants launch into suddenly heated disputes. No tension has been built up before the wild outbursts of insults, and the exchanges are just as abruptly terminated as they started. The attention is directed towards the tape recorder again, as just before the conflict exchanges started, making a nicely shaped frame around the mock fights. In both examples, the exaggerated shouting and laughter affirm the playful key and the ‘pretend frame’ which is typical of ritual conflict (Sheldon 1992: 91). Sometimes the ‘pretend frame’ is also keyed by using a format typical of children’s disputes, i.e. the ‘I am stronger than you’ type of challenge and counter-challenge (cf. Brenneis & Lein 1977): (269) Shouda: Gwen: Shouda: Gwen: Shouda:
·nvÒsinging·/nvÒ ·unclearÒ Yeah, I know that song yeah. I do know that song. Shut your mouth. Oh yeah? Fucking old song. I know more songs than you.
(134801: 11–15)
By talking in this way in front of the tape recorder — and indirectly to the Norwegian researchers they know will listen to the recordings — the speakers present themselves as verbally and emotionally tough girls who do not care too much about the way they speak in front of an adult. In fact, they want adults to hear them fight. And if they cannot find something to fight about, at least they will try to get some ‘bad’ talk on tape (cf. example 262): (270) Susie: many: Susie: Beatrice: Susie:
I want a fight on tape. (…) ·unclearÒ (girls’ chatter in the changing room) Come on then, let’s hear it. You can’t force an argument. Yes you can! ·shoutingÒYou fucking, what you talking about
Ritual conflict 203
Sharon: Susie:
you can’t fucking, you can’t fucking, fucking do an argument you can!·/Ò I’ll fucking argue you lot! …Go on Maria, do it! If she doesn’t she’s disqualified. Yeah, you’re disqualified! …See! It’s all about wits. …Don’t mind me I just don’t know what I’m talking about. Like you, Sharon, what’s your favourite swear word.
(132801: 636–847)
Susie’s heroic attempt to start a heated argument is cut short as abruptly as it started. In the last turn of the example, it seems that Susie realises that her previous utterances were too much like a face-threatening, offensive confrontation, and so she introduces a disclaiming ‘apology’, in which she points out that she does not know what she is talking about. This is followed by a more ‘otherattentive speech act’ (Jefferson 1984), a question directed to Sharon. Perhaps this example shows the difficulties created for working-class girls when the expectations for ‘working-class speech’ and ‘female speech’ collide? Or perhaps it is just a sign that Susie is not close enough to the other girls to feel completely comfortable with ritual conflict? Being rude and direct is generally easier with close friends than with people one does not know well. As Jefferson puts it, ‘rudeness, blasphemy and obscenity can operate as indices of intimacy, their occurrence in some ongoing talk constituting an offered formulation of degree of intimacy’ (1974: 198), and so Susie’s backdown in (270) may be a result of such a constraint rather than (or perhaps, in addition to?) the ‘gender constraint’. No constraints are visible in the conversations between Susie and Sharon, who is described as Susie’s ‘best friend’ in the log book. The two girls both seem to use tough talk as a means of expressing closeness in their friendship. They frequently use directives (e.g. shut up!), threats, insults, and swearwords when addressing each other, but always in a friendly, humorous tone: (271) Sharon: Oh don’t start on me you know, saying I can’t be there on Tuesday! (…) Susie: ·laughingÒI said nothing. [I’m talking about me·/Ò!] Sharon: [·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ] Don’t start because I’ll, I’ll smash your face in! (…) Sharon: I say, I’ve got friends Susie: ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ (…) Sharon: and I’m gonna make them come over and I’m gonna make them beat the shit out of you! (…) Susie: Oh shut up!
204 Trends in Teenage Talk
Sharon: Okay. (132601: 110–133)
(272) Sharon: It was so funny, I had this weird dream the other night, you know. [I mean] Susie: [If it’s about] Take That I don’t wanna hear. Sharon: Oh yeah. It was. Susie: No, I don’t wanna hear it. Sharon: I got off [with ·unclearÒ] Susie: [Oh shut up!] (132601: 40–45)
In (272), Sharon begins by introducing a new topic: she wants to tell about a dream she had the night before. Susie counters immediately with an aggravating account, referring to her own desires not to hear about Sharon’s dream. She accounts for her opposition by means of a conditional clause (if it’s about Take That) preceding the oppositional element (I don’t wanna hear). Although it is possible to interpret a conditional clause as a mitigating device, leaving the opposition open and pending on what happens in the next turn, in this particular context the conditional clause has more of an aggravating function. Susie knows from previous experience that her best friend Sharon is a devoted Take That fan, who is likely to have dreamt about her favourite band and likely to tell Susie — who is less interested — about it. In this context, both girls will perceive Susie’s If it’s about Take That… as more of a warning than an open condition. In fact, it is likely that both girls perceive the utterance as a ‘conditional directive’ (Eisenberg & Garvey 1981), i.e. as meaning ‘if it’s about Take That — and I know it is — then shut up’, in which case the aggravating effect would be even stronger. However, Sharon pretends to have heard only the condition part of Susie’s utterance and responds affirmatively, as though encouraged to go on. This forces Susie to be more explicit in her next turn, where she prefaces her direct oppositional statement (I don’t wanna hear it) with a disagreement token (No). Sharon still pretends not to have heard it, and continues her story. This leads Susie to finally utter a directive explicitly (Oh shut up!). While Sharon has a soft spot for Take That, Susie is a devoted Madonnafan, and Sharon seems very much aware that the least criticism of Madonna is likely to set Susie on fire: (273) Sharon: Susie: Sharon:
Madonna is a whore! (…) No. [Shut your] [She’s so=]
Ritual conflict 205
Susie: Monika: Susie: Monika: Susie: Sharon: Monika: Sharon: Susie: Sharon:
mouth! [Shut] [She is] brilliant! your mouth! I agree with you. Shut, thank you Monika. Shut your mouth! (…) I like Madonna. ·unclearÒ Shut, shut your mouth! Shut your mouth! ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ … ·laughingÒI like Madonna.·/Ò
(132601: 154–168)
In (273), Susie responds to the mock-insult of Madonna with a long sequence of oppositional directives, extending over several turns. Apart from Monika’s support, which she takes the time to acknowledge in the midst of her counterattack (Shut, thank you Monika (…) shut your mouth!), she does not stop even when Sharon produces a backdown (I like Madonna) that undermines the cause for Susie’s opposition. Susie seems to be enjoying the fight and simply wants to go on. 8.3.2 Sex talk and communicating norms A number of ritual insults (or sounds) described by Labov are based upon the model in which ‘the sounder asserts that he sexually insulted or degraded the opponent’s mother’ (1972: 338). The male sexual aggression typical of this kind of insult is a resource girls simply do not have access to. Girls also deal with sexual promiscuity and obscenity in their ritual conflicts, but there is a strong element of censorship in these disputes, and the main purpose seems to be what Eder (1990: 82) calls ‘the communication of normative information’. Put differently: when boys exchange ‘your mum’-insults, the topic is the deviant sexual behaviour of the hearer’s mother, and the aim is to come up with the most insulting and clever attack. When girls argue playfully about sex, however, it is the girls’ own deviant sexual behaviour that is the topic, and the aim seems to be a playful negotiation of what constitutes ‘improper’ behaviour. In (274), Sharon is being massively attacked by a group of girls accusing her of having willingly let a boy see her naked in the changing room: (274) Susie: Sharon: Beatrice:
Yes you did Sharon! ·laughingÒI never·/Ò! He saw [your body]
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Sharon: Beatrice: Sharon: many: Sharon: Mary: Sharon: Susie: Sharon: Susie: Sharon: Susie: Sharon: Susie: Sharon: Beatrice: Sharon: Mary:
[I never.] and ever [since then, face it Sharon!] [I ne=, no shut your mouth!] Shut up! ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ ·shoutingÒI’m not ·unclearÒ·/Ò! ·shoutingÒThat’s ·unclearÒ Sharon·/Ò! He’s a dirty, rotten bastard! Sharon No! you enjoyed it. No. Face it! No! You enjoyed it. I never! [Sharon you wanted to] [·unclearÒ] … ·screamingÒYou rotten bastard·/Ò! ·shoutingÒYou … Sharon … are a sick fat bitch!·/Ò
(132603: 6–26)
According to Labov (1972) and Kochman (1983), one important aspect of ritual insult is that it should not be denied by the target of the insult. Of course, it can be difficult for the target of the insult (and for the analyst!) to distinguish between personal insults and ritual insults when it comes to speaker’s intentions (‘was he serious or not when he said my mum was a slut?’). What ultimately defines the insulting sequence as ritual is that the respondent treats the accusation as non-serious. If an insult is answered by a denial, excuse, or mitigation, this shows that the speaker has perceived it as personal. If he treats it as ritual, he will never deny it, but answer by another ritual insult. In other words, ‘the responsibility for determining whether the play frame shall be maintained or not belongs with the recipient’ (Kochman 1983: 333). However, (274) shows that this distinction is perhaps too strong. Here, there are many signs that we are dealing with personal insults; yet the playful frame of ritual insult is upheld. Susie, Beatrice and Mary attack Sharon’s allegedly indecent behaviour, suggesting that she actually enjoyed exposing herself. As regards speaker’s intention, then, the insults are personal insofar as they have some truth in them (the boy did actually see Sharon naked). As regards Sharon’s response, we get further evidence that she treats the accusations as personal, in that she denies them fiercly (No! I never!). Still, this is no doubt playful. The extensive use of laugh
Ritual conflict 207
tokens and laughingly uttered moves clearly establishes the non-serious, playful nature of this dispute. In other words, this dispute is ‘personal’ in structure and content, but ‘ritual’ in frame and key. This supports Eder’s finding that there was considerable overlap between the serious and the playful disputes among her American informants, and that the dividing line between play and non-play is fragile: ‘On the one hand, girls attempted to lighten the tone of more serious disputes with laughter and other playful acts. On the other hand, playful insults were sometimes taken seriously.’ (1990: 82–83). The overall aim of the exchange in (274) seems to be the negotiation of what is considered appropriate behaviour for a girl. To expose oneself naked to a boy at school is not appropriate behaviour. Agreement about this is what fuels and gives strength to the accusations from Susie, Beatrice and Mary, and is the reason for Sharon’s intense denials. Negotiating norms is also what Susie does in (275). In this exchange, Sharon is flirting with Darren and is inviting herself over to his place. Her sexually allusive remark to Darren in the first turn elicits Susie’s mock-critical evaluation. (275) Sharon: I’ll just come round you can appear I make the energies move quickly ·laughingÒokay?·/Ò Susie: Urgh! That’s disgusting! Sharon: ·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ Susie: I don’t even know what you’re talking about here, you know? I, I don’t [nothing about it.] Sharon: [Talking about], it’s, sex. Susie: I dunno nuffink about sex. I’m an innocent child. Sharon: Mm. Really? Susie: I dunno nuffink about the [birds and bees.] Sharon: [Are you a virgin?] Susie: All I know is, the birds go mm mm, and the bees, and the … the birds go ·nvÒwhistling·/nvÒ. Yes I am a [virgin.] Sharon: [The birds] go buzz, and bees [·laughingÒgo] Susie: [·nvÒlaugh·/nvÒ] Sharon: woo ooh·/Ò! No? Susie: ·singingÒI’m a virgin·/Ò. ·mimicking American accent — from Wayne’s WorldÒNot·/Ò! Sharon: Oh! Dirty cow. Susie: ·singingÒNot me·/Ò. (132601: 236–251)
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Sharon’s first utterance is directed to Darren, and by usurping Darren’s turn, Susie is producing a highly aggravated move, produced as a critical evaluation preceded by an exclamation of disgust. What Susie does is to play with the ‘innocent-girl’ image and pretend she adheres to middle-class standards of female sexual behaviour. Susie continues by claiming, tongue-in-cheek, that she does not know anything about ‘the birds and bees’, all to the amusement of Sharon. She even claims to be a virgin, but she immediately adds the expression Not! to her claim. This expression is a quote from the American TV series Wayne’s World, and is an irony-marker meaning ‘just kidding!’ (the implication being, of course, ‘I’m not a virgin after all’). Sharon’s ‘mock shock’ response (‘Oh! Dirty cow!’) shows that she is impressed by the word play but ‘forced’ by moral standards to reproach it. As was the case with Eder’s informants, Susie and Sharon seem to use ritual conflict to communicate interpersonal norms and particularly norms regarding boy – girl relationships and sex.
8.4 Summing up This chapter has shown that some of the COLT girls do engage in ritual conflict. In the all-female conflict talk subcorpus, there are no examples of ritual insult based on the classical ‘your mum’ format described in Labov 1972. However, in the corpus as a whole, there are some recordings of ‘your mum’ insults where girls do participate: Almost 170 instances of ‘your mum’ insults are recorded by Wyatt in Tower Hamlets, where a group of boys and girls (aged 8 to 13) exchange lengthy sequences insulting each other’s relatives. However, as these sequences occurred in all-male and in mixed-sex conversations, they were not included in the all-female conflict talk subcorpus. In the material we analysed, only the working-class girls engaged in ritual conflict exchanges. The middle-class girls, on the other hand, did not engage in such friendly mock-quarrelling, or at least, on tape, they did not engage in verbal disputes dealing with another girl’s sexual indecency, and they never used sexual abuse words, such as dirty cow, when addressing others (in the corpus as a whole, however, there are a couple of examples where they do). Our findings largely correspond to those of Eder (1990) in her American study, suggesting that they are features of middle-class and working-class female speech not limited to American speakers, but also found in the conversations of English teenage girls.
Ritual conflict 209
The working-class girls we studied were both black. One of the middle-class girls, Chelsea, was also black, and she did not engage in ritual conflict. As was mentioned above, the status of race in COLT is not easy to control for, as we do not have exact information about this for all speakers. At any rate, our study shows that race may be an important factor for some speakers and in some situations, where speakers label themselves members of a ‘black culture’. For some speakers and in other situations, it is less important. For instance, the way Chelsea deals with conflict is more in line with ‘middle-class culture’ than ‘black culture’ (seen as stereotypes). Social class and race are factors which cross-cut each other, and there is no simple correlation between them. As regards gender, our study gives further support to the claim that girls’ ritual conflict generally differs from that of boys. Both Eder (1990) and Goodwin (1993) suggest that an important difference between boys and girls’ ritual conflict is that girls do not seriously compete for status or negotiate rank in the way boys do. Even though they display verbal dispute skills which may compete with those of a boy, they always pay attention to the ‘egalitarian ethos’ of female peer groups, thus negotiating the double workings of ‘gender’ and ‘social class’ in their disputes (cf. Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1995). In other words, in girls’ ritual conflict, the expression of intimacy and closeness, as well as the communication of interpersonal norms, seems to be more important than the competitive element which is so salient in boys’ ritual insult. This is not to say that girls who engage in playful disputes are not at all competitive. Eder, for instance, suggests that playful disputes among girls may indeed have an element of competition: since they value self-defense, ‘they continually challenge each other to come up with a better, more clever response to an accusation or insult’ (1990: 75). This seems to hold for the girls in COLT as well. In other words, even though girls’ ritual conflict is not primarily competitive, it may still have a competitive element. The ritual conflict sequences in our study show that the COLT girls are concerned about being able to stand up to people and to answer back when they are verbally attacked. Even if it is just for fun.
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Chapter 9
Conclusion
Anyone who has participated in the compilation of a corpus of naturally occurring conversation knows what a difficult and time-consuming, but also immensely inspiring, task this can be. In compiling the COLT corpus, our aim was to take the idea of ‘naturally occurring conversation’ to its extreme. To make things easier for ourselves we could, of course, have gathered a limited number of speakers in a quiet room, provided them with a topic to discuss, and switched on the tape recorder. Instead, we chose to let loose our recruits on the street, equipped with tape recorders, microphones, and no other instruction than to record the everyday conversations they had with their friends. No doubt this was a rather daring way of investigating language. However, it turned out to be extremely rewarding, Of course, we had to accept a number of bad quality recordings, as the speaker who carried the walkman did not always sit still, but sometimes moved around while recording, walking, running, playing or fighting. We also had to accept the disturbance of background noise and overlapping speech, as when six speakers are recorded talking simultaneously on the bus. However, taking into account our lack of control over the recording process, we were surprised by the large number of good quality recordings we actually got, and how interesting the material turned out to be from the point of view of linguistic research. Fortunately, in the large majority of the recordings, two or three speakers simply sit quietly down and talk. In most cases not seemingly bothered by the presence of the tape recorder, they talk at length about everyday issues such as friendship and romance, school work and family life, pastimes and hobbies, giving us a glimpse into teenage language and culture in the in the early 1990s. The recruits were instructed to record the conversations they had with their friends, and the large majority of the interactions are between teenagers and their peers. However, a few of the recordings contain mixed age groups, notably the classroom interactions involving teenage students and a teacher, and the family talk, involving the teenagers and their parents, siblings or other relatives. Even though our aim was to investigate teenage peer conversations, the mixed-
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age recordings nevertheless prove interesting. Among other things, they demonstrate how teenagers talk differently in various social settings, accommodating their language as they tell a joke to a friend, answer the teacher’s question in class or discuss homework with their parents. As expressed in the Internet version of an article in The Times Educational Supplement dated December 19, 1997,1 ‘Research has shown that teenagers are perfectly capable of “talking proper” when they want to.’2 Our COLT teenagers, too, showed the ability to ‘talk proper’ in contexts where this was demanded. But first and foremost, they demonstrated their ability to talk ‘teenage language’, which is in fact what they were asked to do. Their awareness of this teenage language task is probably the reason why, in the peer conversations, there is an abundant use of taboo language, both in terms of slang words and swearwords. It is obvious that especially the younger boys wanted to show off, when they discovered that the tape-recorder had been turned on. Sometimes, the speakers were even encouraged to swear and use slang by the recruit who recorded the conversation, who was convinced that this was the kind of language that the research team expected teenagers to use. We would like to emphasise, however, that although teenagers are inclined to use ‘bad’ language among their peers, the sometimes overwhelming use of such language in the COLT recordings is not representative, generally speaking, of the boys — and girls — who took part in the conversations. What we found to be typical teenage vocabulary has been dealt with in Chapter 4 under the label ‘slanguage’, which includes not only what is generally identified as slang but also, for instance, swearwords, vague words (e.g. lots of, and stuff like that), and smallwords (e.g. cos, like, sort of, well). The study showed, not unexpectedly, that the boys (especially the 10–13 year-olds) used more slang and dirty language than the girls. The impact of social background, here in relation to school borough, showed that the lower-class speakers used more slang and more swearwords than the others. As regards vague words, however, the results were different. In fact, the most interesting findings as regards the social distribution of vague expressions were that, contrary to stereotypical assumptions, the use of vague language in COLT was remarkably evenly distributed across the two genders and the different school boroughs.
1.The article was written by Diane Spencer. 2.The research referred to in the article was carried out by Pierre Crinson in his PhD thesis describing ‘the careful speech of Tyneside adolescents’.
Conclusion
A highly common use in the London teenage language, dealt with in Chapter 5, is the unorthodox ways of introducing reported speech. The teenagers were found to have at their disposal a variety of linguistic and paralinguistic means to indicate reported speech, in narratives and elsewhere. The many constructions available, including the quotative be like, the verbs say and go, and zero, quotatives, etc. are used in different contexts and for slightly different purposes. The most interesting findings as regards grammar (Chapter 6) are manifested in the use of well as an adjective intensifier in line with very (it’s well wicked) and the placement of enough before instead after the word it modifies (it’s enough funny). This usage of well and enough, which distinguishes teenage from adult language, turned out to be a revival of Old English usage. It was more often found in boys’ than girls’ conversations, enough among working-class boys and well among middle-class boys. As regards morphology, we noticed that the spread of the American English use of real for really, too, dominates among the middle class boys, which corroborates the general conception among scholars that female speakers tend to stick to the norm, in this case Standard English. Other non-standard grammatical features corresponded largely with the findings concerning youth language reported in Cheshire (1982) and the findings concerning adult language reported in Coupland (1988). The use of invariant tags is a highly common characteristic of teenage talk, more so than of the language of adults. In Chapter 7 we described a set of forms that may serve tag (as well as other) functions, namely eh, okay, right, yeah, and the invariant tag innit. Tags are used with a wide range of subtly different functions. In addition to the well-known epistemic and softening functions of tags, their functional range includes such uses as the imagination-appealing, concept-retrieval helping, response-urging, continuation-checking and proposal-evaluating functions. In Chapter 8, finally, which is more qualitatively oriented than some of the other chapters, we showed how the COLT teenagers participate in an activity called ‘ritual conflict’, i.e. playful, non-serious verbal disputes. Previous studies have shown that ritual conflict is common among working-class, black adolescent males in the US. The core type of ritual conflict is the ‘ritual insult’, consisting of competitive sequences where the participants exchange insults directed at the listener’s mother (the ‘your mum is x’ format). Ritual insult is primarily a male activity; however, our study shows that some forms of ritual conflict are also found among adolescent females. In a subcorpus of COLT, comparing the speech of black and white, middle-class and working-class girls,
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it was found that only the black, working-class girls participated in ritual conflict, whereas the white and middle-class girls did not. On The Times Educational Supplement web site referred to above, there is a discussion about Estuary English, which is said to be adopted by young people ‘probably because it is said to obscure social origins’ and said to increase ‘street cred’ among RP speakers and sophistication to the language of youngsters with a local accent.3 Although we have not studied phonological features in the COLT teenagers’ language, we cannot but notice, while listening to the recordings, that t-glottalisation, for instance, is widely spread, and that certain syntactic features emerging from Cockney said to occur in Estuary English, such as multiple negation and the use of tags (e.g. innit), are, as we have seen, also very common in COLT. To conclude, we hope that this book gives a fair picture of the main tendencies in the London teenage vernacular in the first half of the 1990s. Since then, changes are bound to have occurred, in that new words and expressions have cropped up, modernising and enlarging the teenage vernacular, in particular the variety of teenage vernacular that is adequately referred to as slanguage. Further research is needed to investigate the most recent trends in teenage talk. By creating a corpus of spontaneous teenage conversation and making it available in searchable form, with both sound and text, on the Internet as well as on CD, our intention has been to make it possible for students and researchers to have easy access to teenage talk. At the same time, we hope to promote an interest in the study of teenage language to match the attention devoted to research on the language of children and adults.
3.This refers to a posting by Pia Köhlmyr to the Linguist list, 3 October 1996.
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AUTHOR ""
TITLE "Appendix"
SUBJECT "Studies in Corpus Linguistics, Volume 8"
KEYWORDS ""
SIZE HEIGHT "220"
WIDTH "150"
VOFFSET "4">
Appendix
Appendix 1: COLT transcription conventions (orthographic) Symbol
Comment
,.?! CAPS = ,
sentence-like boundaries; also continuing, terminating, questioning, and exclamatory intonation sentence beginnings incomplete word brief pause
. … …(5) ·nvÒ laugh ·/nvÒ ·nameÒ ·addressÒ ·unclearÒ ·unclearÒ (5) [text] [{text }] ·mimickingÒ text ·/Ò (hairdryer on) ·??Ò text ·/Ò
medium pause long pause pause 5 seconds non-verbal sound personal name/place name replaced to preserve anonymity address replaced to preserve anonymity unintelligible speech unintelligible speech 5 seconds single overlap double overlap paralinguistic features contextual comment uncertain transcription
(sic)
awkward pronunciation
222 Trends in Teenage Talk
Appendix 2: COLT personal data sheet
AUTHOR ""
TITLE "Index"
SUBJECT "Studies in Corpus Linguistics, Volume 8"
KEYWORDS ""
SIZE HEIGHT "220"
WIDTH "150"
VOFFSET "4">
Index
A Aas 219 abusives 64, 72, 80 activities 18, 50, 51, 53, 217 age 3, 5, 7, 10, 17-20, 19, 25-27, 29, 34, 38, 61, 66, 73, 74, 77, 81, 85, 88, 91, 92, 97, 105, 107, 113, 114, 125, 131, 133, 135, 160, 162, 185, 186, 191, 197, 211 age group 19, 113, 125, 186 aggravating 198, 204 aggressive swearing 77 Aijmer 165, 215 Algeo 165, 167, 175, 215 alignment 11 Allen 68, 73, 215 and stuff 43, 60, 89, 90, 99, 100, 103, 102, 212, 216, 219 and things 83, 87, 100, 101, 103, 102, 140 Andersen 18, 22, 25, 90-92, 115, 117, 166, 167, 168, 172, 183, 215, 219 Andersson 63, 66, 68, 76, 215 approximative 117 Apte 215 Atkinson 198, 199, 215, 218, 219 attitude 16, 32, 35, 70, 111, 116, 117, 167, 177, 178, 215 auxiliary deletion 133 B Barnet 3, 20, 22, 24, 26, 67, 75, 82, 100, 145, 151, 152, 155, 190 BE like 65, 213 Beowulf 158 Berland 23, 25, 26, 133, 165, 172, 215 Biber 99, 100, 102, 135, 150, 153, 215
Birner 99, 220 black culture 209 bloody 72, 76, 80, 83, 82, 84, 93, 119, 131, 139-141, 143, 159, 160, 162, 170, 180 BNC 2, 3, 7-10, 84, 85, 84, 105, 138, 141, 142, 141, 142, 147, 153, 157, 161, 167, 186, 187, 186 body 7, 17, 43-46, 108, 195, 205 Bolinger 165, 215 borough 22 Brenneis 199, 202, 215, 218 Brotherton 99, 215 Brown 6, 165, 167, 198, 199, 216, 218 burnout 16, 18 Butters 119, 216 Bynes 86, 216 C Camden 3, 14, 15, 20, 22, 24, 25, 67, 75, 82, 104, 136, 151, 155, 190 Cameron 92, 216 Carter 92, 216 CD-ROM x, 11 challenges 199, 202, 219 Channell 66, 86-89, 88, 90-92, 94, 95, 99, 102, 105, 216 Cheshire x, 131, 133, 138, 161, 213, 216 Christian 165, 216 clothes 31, 43, 45, 46, 75, 93, 108, 148, 149, 160 Coates 92, 148, 216 cognitive background 171, 175 cognitive environment 173 communicative style 30, 58 competitive 35, 37, 82, 195, 196, 198, 209, 213
224 Trends in Teenage Talk
complementiser 109, 116, 120 computers 26, 46, 49 concept-retrieval helper 173, 175, 181 concept-retrieving 177 conduciveness 176, 178 Conrad 215 constructed dialogue 107, 110, 220 continuation-checking 176, 177, 180, 183, 184, 191, 213 conversation log 5, 22 CoolEdit 11 cooperation 196, 198 coordination tags 99, 102 Corpus WorkBench 11 Coupland 138, 161, 213, 216 Crawford 47, 199, 216 Crouch 165, 216 Crowdy 2, 3, 7, 8, 216 Crystal 87, 88, 94, 216 D Daitz 86, 216 Davy 87, 88, 94, 216 Dines 98-100, 216 direct speech 111, 118-120 directive 174, 176-179, 181, 204 dirty slang xi, 65, 66, 71, 73-75, 79, 80, 82, 105, 146 dirty words 63, 64, 66-68, 72, 73, 77, 82, 83, 82, 84, 85, 84, 86, 105, 161, 162 drinking 41, 42 drugs 50, 51, 68, 69, 76 Dubois 165, 216 E Eble 67, 216 Eckert 18, 196, 209, 216 Eder 195, 196, 199, 200, 205, 207, 208, 209, 216 Edwards 138, 216 Eisenberg 198, 199, 204, 217 equipment 3, 5 Erman 168
ethnic minority 21, 22, 24, 127, 133, 168, 190 ethnicity 13, 18, 22, 23, 114, 128, 189, 190, 191, 219 exemplificatory 117 exhibitionist swearing 77 expletives 64, 80 F face-saving 198 face-threatening 181, 198, 199, 203 facilitative function 177, 181 Fanshel 198, 199, 218 field worker 22 fillers 63, 65 film 46, 52 Finegan 215 fucking 15, 16, 38, 41, 42, 46, 56, 63, 64, 69, 72, 76, 79-81, 83, 93, 95, 115, 131, 139-141, 143, 154, 155, 159, 160, 162, 201, 202 functional properties 166, 172, 183 G Garvey 198, 199, 204, 217 gender 7, 18, 19, 27, 66, 73, 74, 80, 81, 83, 92, 93, 97, 98, 102, 103, 102, 105, 106, 113, 114, 126, 131, 135, 142, 143, 160-162, 187, 188, 191, 193, 195, 203, 209, 216, 217 gender constraint 203 general extender 99 gesture 117 GO 65, 118, 213 god 34, 83, 82, 84-86, 105 Goodwin 195, 199, 209, 217 grammaticalisation 166, 168 Green 217 Greenbaum 2, 219 Grimshaw 194, 216, 217 H Harness 217 Haslerud 8, 217
Index 225
Hasund 88, 115, 193, 195, 197, 217, 219 hearer-orientation 167, 171, 176 Heath 196, 217 hedge 148, 149 Heritage 198, 199, 215, 218 Hertfordshire 4, 20, 24, 26, 31, 50, 53, 67, 75, 82, 93, 94, 98, 103, 102, 105, 151, 152, 155, 190 hesitation 117 hesitational device 180 hesitational/linking 117 high-involvement style 107 Holmes 142, 165-167, 170, 217 Hudson x, 115, 118, 167, 217, 220 Hughes 138, 161, 217 I imagination-appealing 169, 172, 174, 177, 179, 184, 191, 213 imperative 115 indirect speech 107, 120 indirectness 196, 198 inference 116 innit ix, 2, 30, 38, 42, 49, 63, 65, 80, 120, 134, 135, 137, 136, 138, 151, 165-169, 168-175, 179, 181, 184, 183-185, 187, 186, 187, 188-190, 213-215, 219 insult 194, 195, 205, 206, 209, 213 intensifier 69, 139, 141-144, 146-155, 154, 156-158, 160, 162, 163, 213 intensifiers xi, 64, 80, 131, 139-142, 141-143, 142, 143, 159, 160-163 interactional 172, 173 interactional function 167, 173, 182 interpretive use 117, 118, 122 invariabilisation 168 invariant tag 134, 165-168, 172, 177, 183, 184-191, 213 in-betweens 18 J Jefferson 99, 198, 199, 203, 218 jock 18
Joe 36, 39, 66-68, 76, 77, 82, 84-86, 194, 218 Johansson 2, 215 Johnstone 110, 218 Jucker 215, 218 K Kerswill 17, 218 Kirk 218, 219 Kochman 194, 195, 199, 206, 218 L labelling 196 Labov 194, 196, 198, 199, 205, 206, 208, 218 Lange 115, 219 Leech 215, 217, 219 Lein 199, 202, 215, 218 Lighter 66, 218 Ljung 77, 218 location 18, 133, 191 loose use 110 Lorenz 147, 159, 218 love 32, 34, 35, 40, 47, 77, 160, 174 M Maori 165 markedness 198 Mathis 110, 111, 218, 220 Maynard 199, 218 McConnell-Ginet 196, 209, 216, 217 metacommunicative effect 176 metalinguistic 15, 117 microphone 1, 5, 27, 28, 47, 78, 129, 154, 179, 181, 201 middle-class culture 209 Millar 165, 167, 218 Milroy x, 216, 218 mimickry 15, 109-113, 112-114, 116, 123, 124 mitigating 198, 200, 204 modulation 116 money 7, 38, 39, 60, 144 Monstad 219
226 Trends in Teenage Talk
multifunctional 64, 141 multiple negation 131, 133, 134, 137, 138, 214 music ix, 46-48, 68, 75, 76 mutual manifestness 173 myths 77 N narrative 110 near-quotative 120 negative politeness 167 New Zealand English 165 non-incorporation 110 non-linguistic parameters 13, 18 non-standard xi, 23, 123, 131, 133, 134, 133, 135-137, 136-138, 143, 145, 147, 161, 162, 188, 213 non-tag functions 177, 183 norms 18, 20 Norrick 165, 167, 218 O okay x, 22, 30, 33-35, 40, 44, 50, 55, 60, 108, 122, 144, 165-167, 172, 176, 178-180, 184, 183-185, 187, 186-191, 207, 213, 215 or something 51, 55, 60, 69, 89, 93, 94, 97, 99, 101, 103, 102, 104, 149 Overstreet 99, 100, 219 P Paradis 141, 219 parents ix, 4, 18-21, 25, 27, 31, 55, 57, 59-61, 79, 84, 92, 152, 155, 211 partying 41, 42, 51 Peach 23, 219 peer group 18, 29, 30, 32, 68, 160, 195, 209 peers 27, 28, 194, 211 Peirce 87, 219 peremptory 169, 170, 175, 181, 184, 183 pitch 116, 170 placeholders 88, 95, 96, 98 play frame 200, 206
politeness 170 Pomerantz 198, 199, 219 power 72, 92 pragmatic marker 116, 119, 173, 186, 215 pragmatic particle 168 premodifier 141, 145, 157, 162 prestige 3, 13, 15, 77 pretend frame 200, 202 proper slang 65, 69, 70, 69-71, 73-75, 105 proposal-evaluating 179, 183, 184, 191, 213 Q Quirk 8, 66, 80, 135, 145, 147, 153, 156, 157, 158, 165, 219, 220 quotative 116, 117 quotative marker 109, 111, 114, 118, 120, 127 R Ratcliffe 22, 219 really 1, 6, 15, 16, 29, 31, 34, 46, 57, 58, 61, 63, 66, 69, 72, 79, 87, 90, 100, 101, 108, 116, 117, 119-122, 126, 128, 131, 132, 139, 140, 141, 143, 146-154, 161, 162, 179, 180, 182, 197, 200, 201, 213, 216, 219 recording 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 28, 38, 54, 57, 133, 144, 175, 201, 211 recruit 4, 5, 19, 20, 22, 26, 52, 135, 197, 212 reference assignment 173 reported speech 110, 115 reporting verb ix, 107, 109, 116, 118, 119, 127 residential borough 20, 21 response signal 176, 180 response-prompting 182 response-urging 178, 184, 191, 213 ritual insult 38, 58, 75, 194-196, 199, 205, 206, 208, 209, 213 Romaine 115, 219 romance 32, 34, 35, 37, 211
Index 227
S Schofield 196, 219 school borough 3, 20, 23, 66, 73, 75, 81, 82, 92-94, 97, 98, 102, 103, 102, 105, 145, 160, 212 scope 3, 27, 101, 116, 144, 150, 152, 163, 165, 173 Scottish 165 self-defense 209 self-disclosing 150 set marker 65, 87, 98-102, 104 Sheldon 198, 199, 202, 219 siblings 27, 31, 211 signifying 120, 195 slang 13, 18, 63-77, 94, 105, 146, 153, 158, 212, 219 smallwords xi, 63-65, 212 smoking 42, 50 social background 14, 18, 93, 94, 106, 131, 160, 161, 212 social class 7, 10, 16-18, 20, 21, 25, 67, 98, 105, 114, 126, 127, 133, 151, 155, 162, 188, 193, 195, 196, 209, 215 social class index 21 social parameter 125, 191 social swearing 77 softening 148, 150, 169, 176, 184, 191, 199, 213 SoftSound 11 sort of 42, 54, 64, 65, 89-91, 93, 94, 96, 101, 103, 104, 108, 116, 117, 128, 148, 167, 171, 174, 179, 182, 197, 212 sound file x, 11 sounding 196 speech act 170 Sperber 110, 186, 220 status 1, 3, 18, 66, 116, 122, 145-147, 157-159, 183, 194, 209 Stenström 165, 167, 168 stereotypes 52, 196, 209 subjective 110 subjective function 110, 166 surprise 117 Svartvik 2, 8, 219, 220
swearing 7, 18, 63, 66, 76-79, 81, 82, 84, 86, 105 swearwords 64-66, 72, 76, 78-80, 79, 80, 81, 82, 141, 203, 212 T taboo 6, 39, 64, 66, 68, 73, 76, 77, 82, 95, 139, 140, 143, 146, 159, 162, 212 tag question 16, 165, 168, 173, 175, 181, 215-217 tagging 3, 11, 10 Tagliamonte 115, 118, 220 Tandberg 168, 220 Tannen 107, 110, 217, 220 teachers 19, 27, 42, 54, 57, 63, 79, 92, 106 textual 110, 173 tone 110, 170 topic 27, 30-32, 39, 48, 49, 52-54, 56, 148, 167, 168, 174, 204, 205, 211, 220 Tower Hamlets 3, 4, 20, 22, 24-26, 50, 58, 67, 75, 74, 75, 82, 105, 123, 131, 133, 136, 137, 144, 145, 190, 191, 194, 208 transcription 1, 3, 7-10, 221 Trudgill 63, 66, 68, 76, 77, 138, 161, 215, 217, 220 TV 46, 208 V vague 63-67, 86-89, 88, 90-94, 96, 99, 105, 106, 117, 124, 212 vague additives 87 vague category identifiers 99 vagueness 66, 86-88, 90, 93, 100 vogue xi, 65, 69 W Ward 99, 220 West African English 165 White 23 Williams 17, 218 Wilson 110, 186, 220
228 Trends in Teenage Talk
Y yeah 2, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 29-32, 34, 35, 36, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 50, 54, 56, 57, 63, 65, 69, 78, 93, 99, 100, 101, 104, 107-109, 121, 123, 132, 134, 137, 144, 149, 152, 153, 154, 158-160, 165, 166, 167, 172-185, 187, 186, 187, 188-191, 202, 204, 213, 215 you know ix, 15, 16, 31-34, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 51-53, 56, 57, 64, 65, 91, 96, 97, 99, 100, 108, 115, 117, 120-122, 128, 132, 139, 148, 149, 151, 169, 170, 175, 178, 180, 197, 203, 204, 207
your mum 40, 100, 205, 208, 213 Yule 99, 100, 110, 111, 218-220 Z zero-quotative 110, 111, 116 Ziv 215, 218
In the series STUDIES IN CORPUS LINGUISTICS (SCL) the following titles have been published thus far: 1. PEARSON, Jennifer: Terms in Context. 1998. 2. PARTINGTON, Alan: Patterns and Meanings. Using corpora for English language research and teaching. 1998. 3. BOTLEY, Simon and Anthony Mark McENERY (eds.): Corpus-based and Computational Approaches to Discourse Anaphora. 2000. 4. HUNSTON, Susan and Gill FRANCIS: Pattern Grammar. A corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of English. 2000. 5. GHADESSY, Mohsen, Alex HENRY and Robert L. ROSEBERRY (eds.): Small Corpus Studies and ELT. Theory and practice. 2001. 6. TOGNINI-BONELLI, Elena: Corpus Linguistics at Work. 2001. 7. ALTENBERG, Bengt and Sylviane GRANGER (eds.): Lexis in Contrast. Corpus-based approaches. 2002. 8. STENSTRÖM, Anna-Brita, Gisle ANDERSEN and Ingrid Kristine HASUND: Trends in Teenage Talk. Corpus compilation, analysis and findings. 2002. 9. REPPEN, Randi, Susan M. FITZMAURICE and Douglas BIBER (eds.): TUsing Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation. n.y.p. 10. AIJMER, Karin: English Discourse Particles. Evidence from a corpus. 2002. 11. BARNBROOK, Geoff: Defining Language. A local grammar of definition sentences. n.y.p.
