Abstract
This paper is concerned with discourse styles in spoken British English. The investigation is based on the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT) and the spoken component of the British National Corpus (BNC), two corpora which mirror the state of the language at the beginning of the 1990s. The study focuses on differences in the distribution of the discourse markers oh, well, you know and I mean across gender, age and register. It is shown that female speakers in COLT and the BNC use discourse markers more frequently than male speakers whenever there are obvious dissimilarities. Furthermore, the findings reveal that the investigated discourse markers tend to be more common among adults than adolescents and that differences between spontaneous and formal communication seem to be larger among adults than teenagers.
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