Age Flashcards
Jenny Cheshire
‘Life Event’s theory’ = suggests chronological age is not the main influence on a person’s language but rather that it’s the individual’s experiences of life events shape their language. This occurs during ‘emerging adulthood’ because this is stage where people leave education + go down individual route
- 18 ‘teen talk’ whereas 20’s not recognisable
informal lang ‘innit
Penelope Eckert
‘teen talk’ discovered during our teen years our chronological age plays significant role in our language use as we have more shared experiences + strong group identity than other groups do
features of teen speak:
- word shortenings
- slang = chopped
- cultural mixing = wagwan
but not every teen speaks the same
Odato
challenges those who criticise ‘teen speak’ as inferior code + found ‘like’ is governed by complex rules which children must develop in order to us ethe code e.g. usage as discourse marker
- like is used infrequently in syntactic positions beginning + end
- used in number of positions girls move to this stage at 5 boys 7
- use frequently before prepositional phrase ‘Look at how yours landed like right on the target
Emma Thompson article
Actress Emma Thompson says young people make themselves look stupid by speaking slang outside of school. She criticises teenagers for using ‘like’ and ‘innit’
she calls this speech sloppy language and makes her feel insane
John Ayto -
states fillers are a way we stall for time when speaking and it has nothing to do with sloppiness he says “we all use fillers cause we can’t keep up highly monitored, highly grammatical all the time
Robert Groves
editor of Collins Dictionary of the English Language + outlines there are 4 main ways the filler ‘like’ is used by young people
Quotative = which marks reported speech e.g. she was like you aren’t using that correctly
Metaphor or exaggeration = ‘I like died of embarrassment’
Filler
signalling membership of a club = way of signalling that they belong to a group to show they fit in
