And They:

Discourse connectives in casual and careful speech of New South teens

Boyd Davis

Sat. 2:00-3:40 C

This presentation describes and analyzes ways male and female teens vary in their use of pronouns and discourse connectives in casual and careful speech. Data is taken from a series of in-school interviews about names for social groups and about out-of-school reading choices. While the schools are in different neighborhoods, ranging from inner-city to middle-class suburbs to rural suburban locations, cross-town busing to equalize ethnic representation means that for this New South city, school and neighborhood boundaries are not always alike. Inferences about perceived and self-reported rural vs. urban influences on teen dialect, for example, must be checked against zip code and community location for home as well as school location. Interviews from five of the thirty-one schools, each visited over a three-year period, are discussed.

The interviews fall into two groups; the characterization of speech as Careful and as Casual is keyed to the volume and styles of language elicited by questionnaires as opposed to prompted conversation:

I. CAREFUL: prescribed questionnaire format about out-of-school reading choices, with some conversational interaction at answers keyed to personal experience or opinion.

A. teen interviewing teen

a. teens in dyads (f-f, m-m, f-m, m-f) interview each other

b. a single teen (m or f) interviews a series of teens

B. investigating adult interviewing series of teens

II. CASUAL: investigating adult interviews of single teens about names for social groups, prompting for answers to key questions within extended conversation.

References

B. Davis, M. Smilowitz and L. Neely, In press. Speaking maps and talking worlds: adolescent language usage in a New South community. To appear in C. Bernstein, R. Sabino, T. Nunnally, eds., Language and Variation in the South II (U. Alabama).

P. Eckert, 1988. Adolescent social structure and the spread of linguistic change. Language in Society 17:245-68.

Grimshaw, Allen D., 1991. Unawareness without ignorance: unexplained contributions to sociology. Contemporary Sociology 20:843-53.

Labov, William, 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change, I. Blackwell.

Muhlhausler, P. and R. Harre, 1990. Pronouns and People. Blackwell.

D. Schiffrin, 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge University Press.