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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 518

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Discourse markers 1967 and 1996. Individual variation and change

Authors: Sundgren, Eva
Submitted by: Sundgren, Eva (Mälardalen University, Sweden)

In my Ph.D. thesis (Sundgren 2002) I present a picture of linguistic variation and change in Eskilstuna during the last decades of the 20th century. In 1967 Nordberg made a big series of recordings with 83 native inhabitants of Eskilstuna, and I made the recordings for the return visit in 1996, i.e. one generation after the first Eskilstuna survey. The main purpose was to examine language change in real time. The return visit combined the merits of a panel and a trend study, and could thus provide information on both individual and generational change. The new sample for the trend survey comprised 72 speakers. The panel study comprised 13 of the speakers that Nordberg recorded in 1967. In my investigation I analysed seven morphological and morphophonological variables.

I have now returned to the panel study to investigate other linguistic features, for example lexical and syntactic, and I have begun with an investigation of the 13 panel speakers’ use of discourse markers on the two recording occasions. Discourse markers have attracted much interest during the last decades, but most investigations have focussed on how teenagers use discourse markers. My corpus consists of speakers of all ages.

In accordance with Lindström (2008:78) I use discourse marker as “a generic term for words and expressions which function as conversation-regulating signals or which modify utterances”, and I adopt his distinction between discourse particles (primary discourse markers) and secondary discourse markers.

In my account I present results from the analysis of both inter- and intraindividual variation and change.

References:

Lindström, Jan, 2008: Tur och ordning. Introduktion till svensk samtalsgrammatik. (In turn. An introduction to Swedish conversational grammar.) Stockholm: Norstedts Akademiska Förlag

Sundgren, Eva, 2002: Återbesök i Eskilstuna. En undersökning av morfologisk variation och förändring i nutida talspråk. (Eskilstuna revisited. An investigation of morphological variation and change in present-day spoken Swedish.) (Papers published by the Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University 56.) Uppsala.