The Expression of Negation in British Teenagers’ Language: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

This article, based primarily on data from the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), is concerned with the description of those features of the negative polarity system that can be regarded as particularly characteristic of teenage language. A comparison is drawn with the expression of negation by adults, looking at a subcorpus of data extracted from the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE). Findings are classified into three main categories: syntactic, lexical, and pragmatic. At the syntactic level, teenage spoken language is characterized by a high frequency of negatives, a large number of negative concord structures, a common use of never as a single negator in the past, and a particular way of intensifying negative statements. Teenage spoken lexis shows the innovative use of some new negative items and a high proportion of negative polarity idioms. From a pragmatic perspective, the language of the teenagers in the corpus is notable for avoiding hedges and for being extremely direct and straightforward. Adolescent speakers also tend to use negatives as a kind of game to contradict their interlocutors. The article concludes by arguing that the expression of negation in teenage language is best understood within the framework of the interaction of cognitive and sociological variables.