“ I might, I might go I mean it depends on money things and stuff”. A preliminary analysis of general extenders in British teenagers’ discourse

Abstract

The language of teenagers is of particular interest to linguists, in that adolescents and young people introduce important innovations and changes into language use, as compared to the stability typical of adult language. This paper is concerned with the analysis of the spoken language of British teenagers, taken from the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), and looks specifically at a group of English expressions, referred in the literature under different names, ‘general extenders’ being one of the most common of these in recent years. Data collected from the corpus is contrasted with a comparable sample of the language of adults taken from the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE). Particular attention is paid to three expressions, and stuff, and everything and and things, since of all general extenders these show the most distinctive features in terms of use and frequency when teenage talk and adult speech are compared. Findings indicate, firstly, that general extenders are, as expected, more typical of speech than of writing; secondly, that they are, contrary to the initial hypothesis, generally more common in adults than in teenage language, although some do occur more frequently in the language of teenagers; thirdly, that their use seems to have increased in recent times; fourthly, that the three general extenders present some features typical of grammaticalization; and finally, that no typical pragmatic function of these is associated with the language of teenagers, although and stuff and and everything often lose their original set-marking condition in teenage production, that is, their habitual function of classifying an item as a member of a particular class or category, and are used instead as markers of group and social identity.