Stenstrom Anna-Brita Stenstrom – författare

Despite its potential influence on the standard language, there is still relatively little written about the language of the young. This book gives new insight into some important areas of their language, such as identity construction reflected, for instance, in prosodic patterns and language choice, the use of discourse markers and slang in a contrastive perspective, the pragmatics of fixed expressions and the impact of English on the teenage vernacular. Most of the articles are corpus-based, and all represent naturally occurring spontaneous conversation. The book will be of interest to linguists, university students and anyone interested in today’s adolescent language and language change.

This book brings together a number of empirical studies that use corpora to study discourse patterns in speech and writing. It explores new trends in the area of text and discourse characterized by the alliance between text linguistics and areas such as corpus linguistics, genre analysis, literary stylistics and cross-linguistic studies. The contributions to the volume show how established corpora can be used to ask a number of new questions about the interface between speech and writing, the relation between grammar and discourse, academic discourse, cohesive markers, stylistic devices such as metaphor, deixis and non-verbal communication. The corpora used for text-analysis can also be tailor-made for the study of particular genres such as journal article abstracts, lectures, e-mailing list messages, headlines and titles. A recent development is to bring in contrastive data from bilingual corpora to show what is language-specific in the organization of the text.