{"id":1445,"date":"2011-04-07T10:00:57","date_gmt":"2011-04-07T08:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1445"},"modified":"2011-03-30T12:21:38","modified_gmt":"2011-03-30T10:21:38","slug":"youngspeak-in-a-multilingual-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1445","title":{"rendered":"Youngspeak in a multilingual perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"
Youngspeak in a multilingual perspective<\/strong>. Ed. by Anna-Brita Stenstr<\/strong>\u00f6<\/strong>m<\/strong> and Annette Myre J<\/strong>\u00f8<\/strong>rgensen<\/strong>. (Pragmatics and beyond new series 184.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. <\/strong>Pp. vi, 206. ISBN 9789027254290<\/a>. $135 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Esther N\u00fa\u00f1ez Villanueva<\/strong>, Bangor University<\/em><\/p>\n

Although it has been identified as the locus <\/em>of language change, teenage talk has not occupied a significant place in the linguistics research agenda. This welcome publication brings together thirteen innovative articles on the topic. Many of the articles (including all the contributions in Parts 2 and 3) use recently developed corpora of teenage conversations: the <\/em>Corpus Oral del Lenguaje Adolescente <\/em>(Spanish spoken corpus of youth language) and the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language feature predominantly.<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

Anna-Brita Stenstr\u00f6m and Annette Myre J\u00f8rgensen open the volume with an introductory chapter that provides the theoretical background for the volume. A comprehensive series of guidelines for research on youngspeak is found in Klaus Zimmermann<\/strong>\u2019s contribution. This article is included in Part 3 since it is specifically targeted to crosslinguistic research, but his insightful comments are broader in scope.<\/p>\n

The volume is divided into three parts devoted to particular areas of study. Part 1 analyzes the linguistic tools that teenagers use to project their identity by expressing group membership and rejection of other groups. The three contributions to this section constitute a fruitful link between discourse analysis tools and socio-psychological methods. Argiris Archakis<\/strong> and Dimitris Papazachariou<\/strong> analyze the prosodic devices used by a group of young Greek females to differentiate the reported speech of authoritative figures from that of peers. Janet Spreckels<\/strong> examines how a group of German teenagers shows group membership and disaffiliation to other groups in their discourse by exaggeration and polyphonic discourse. Vally Lytra<\/strong> and Ta<\/strong>\u015fkin Bara\u00e7<\/strong> investigate how multilingualism is used to construct identity among young Turkish-English bilinguals in Turkish complementary schools.<\/p>\n

The contributions in Part 2 are devoted to the study of particular linguistic expressions common in teenage speech that could become established in the language. Juan A. Mart\u00ednez L\u00f3pez <\/strong>identifies new intensifiers used by Madrid adolescents. <\/em>Annette Myre J\u00f8rgensen <\/strong>discusses the use of hedging in youngspeak, a linguistic strategy used to mitigate the strength of an utterance.<\/p>\n

Part 3 is devoted to crosslinguistic analyses of teenage speech. The four contributions contrast linguistic items, degrees of slang used, and English borrowings across languages to reveal the versatility of teenage language. Anna-Brita Stenstr\u00f6m <\/strong>compares the functions of two pragmatic markers in Spanish and English, Spanish pues nada <\/em>and English anyway. <\/em>Eli-Marie Drange <\/strong>discovers that Anglicisms are not only used to fill lexical gaps but, surprisingly, to fulfill such functions as reinforcing a message or catching the attention of the hearers. Jolanta Legaudaite <\/strong>considers teenage slang a product of psychological and socio-cultural motives. Contrasting the functions of slang in English and Lithuanian, the author finds interesting differences in the functions and percentage of slang used.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Youngspeak in a multilingual perspective. Ed. by Anna-Brita Stenstr\u00f6m and Annette Myre J\u00f8rgensen. (Pragmatics and beyond new series 184.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. Pp. vi, 206. ISBN 9789027254290. $135 (Hb). Reviewed by Esther N\u00fa\u00f1ez Villanueva, Bangor University Although it has been identified as the locus of language change, teenage talk has not occupied a significant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1445"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1446,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions\/1446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}