128 Anna-Brita Stenström
Teenage Language (COLT), which so far are the only corpora of teenage language
that are accessible for research online. And since it cannot be claimed that vale
and okay are typically used by teenagers without making a comparison with adult
speakers, I have consulted the study of vale used by adults in Madrid undertaken
by Cestero Mancera & Moreno Fernández (2008), and the use of okay by London
adults in the British National Corpus, or more precisely BNC/South, which covers
the London area.
The following questions have been in focus:- What are the similarities and differences between the functions of vale and
okay? - Is there a difference in frequency of vale and okay in the two corpora?
- Are there any differences from a sociolinguistic point of view?
- Are vale and okay typically used by teenagers?
1.2 The corporaThe two teenage corpora consist of conversations between 13- to 17-year old boys
and girls with varying socio-economic backgrounds, ranging from lower to upper/
middle class. The conversations were recorded by voluntary students who recorded
their conversations with their friends in various surroundings for a couple of days.
This resulted in two corpora of roughly the same size, around half a million words.
The two corpora are largely comparable, since COLAm was collected with COLT
as a model for the specific purpose of facilitating contrastive studies of teenage
language. One disadvantage for this study has been that vale occurred only in
age group 14–16, which leaves out the 13 and 17 year-olds. Consequently, the use
of vale and okay in relation to age has not been considered. On the other hand,
the fact that COLT was collected in the 1990s and COLAm ten years later is not
expected to have any serious effects on the results of this study, since both vale
and okay seem to be fairly stable elements in everyday talk. For more information
about the corpora, see <www.colam.org> and <www.hd.uib.no/colt>.1.3 ProcedureThe definition of pragmatic markers in Section 2 is followed by a short introduc-
tion of the two markers to be dealt with in the paper: vale and okay. The way they
function on the interactional, interpersonal and discourse levels of conversation
is illustrated in Section 3. Section 4 is devoted to their frequency from a sociolin-
guistic point of view and ends with a brief comparison of the use of vale and okay
in teenage vs adult conversation. The main findings are summed up in Section 5,