Youngspeak
Spanish vale and English okay
Anna-Brita Stenström
Bergen UniversityAs has been emphasized in a number of publications, pragmatic/discourse
markers play a crucial role in colloquial language overall, and in young people’s
language in particular. But the use of pragmatic markers in a contrastive
perspective has attracted less attention. This paper is devoted to the Spanish
pragmatic marker vale and its closest English equivalent okay, as they are used
in Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm) and The Bergen
Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT). These markers have a great deal in
common: (1) they are both very frequent in conversational encounters, (2) they
are both multifunctional, and (3) most of the functions seem to converge. The
study shows, among other things, that okay is a more versatile marker than vale,
which, on the other hand, is slightly more frequent than okay, and that both
markers are used more frequently by teenagers than by adults.Keywords: pragmatic markers, teenagers, contrastive, levels of interaction,
Spanish/English- Introduction
1.1 Aim
This study focuses on the use of the pragmatic markers vale in Spanish and okay
in English teenage conversations, or more precisely, on the extent to which their
functions converge. It might of course be argued that both vale and okay are very
common in Spanish and English conversation overall and not typically in teenage
conversation. However, since pragmatic markers in general are considered to be
used more frequently by teenagers than by adults, there is good reason to study
the use of vale and okay in this language variety. The study is based on Corpus Oral
de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm) and The Bergen Corpus of London