Masters Degrees (General Linguistics)

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Browsing Masters Degrees (General Linguistics) by Subject "Adolescent language"

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    So we were just like, 'ok' : the discourse markers like and just in the speech of young South Africans
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-04) Lochner, Nicole Jean; Huddlestone, Kate; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Discourse markers are often studied in connection to language change, as the development of discourse markers indicates a shift in both the linguistic and social aspects of language. These markers are adopted into a language and will either change with the language, or fall into disuse. Historically, discourse markers were seen to be meaningless fillers, however, more recent research has shown that discourse markers perform vital functions with regards to linguistic interactions in spoken discourse. It is necessary to determine what these key functions are and how they fit into the structure of the language in order to show that the markers do more than act as pause fillers. Previous research has looked into a number of different discourse markers in different English varieties but there has been little to no research into discourse markers in South African English. This study reported on in this thesis focuses on the discourse markers like and just as they are used in South African English. The study investigates the structural distribution of each of these discourse markers, following the methodology used by Tagliamonte (2005), as well as the functions of both like and just as they occur in the data. The frequency of use of the discourse markers by age and sex was also investigated. The data used to inform the study was made up of conversational interviews with 17 participants. The interview data was transcribed to form a corpus, made up of 22897 words, of which 735 were tokens of like and 181 were tokens of just. The results showed that like was most used by females between the ages of 15 and 18. While like was used by all three age groups, the prevalence of the marker in the 15 to 18 age group may indicate an age-grading phenomena. Just was used more frequently by females between the ages of 19 and 21. The data showed that the use of just increased by age suggesting that the discourse marker is currently undergoing linguistic change. Like was found to occur most commonly before a noun phrase while just is found more frequently before a verb. With regards to the functional distribution, like functioned mostly as a pause filler, although it also frequently functioned as an approximator. Just most commonly held the function of minimiser, specifically minimising an assertion. Nevertheless, the results show that both like and just have a number of different functions and are therefore not merely pause fillers and do adhere to the syntactic rules of the language.