‘‘I might, I might go I mean it depends on money things and stuff’’. § A preliminary analysis of general extenders in British teenagers’ discourse Ignacio M. Palacios Martı ´nez * Department of English and German, University of Santiago de Compostela, Avda. Alfonso Castelao, s/n, 15.782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain 1. Introduction Interest in teenagers’ language has grown over the last few decades, not least because teenagers introduce important innovations, some of which are subsequently incorporated into the standard language of adults (Romaine, 1984; Erman, 1995; Kerswill, 1996; Eckert, 1988, 2000; Rodrı ´guez, 2002; Stenstro ¨ m et al., 2002; Tagliamonte, 2005; Du ¨ rscheid and Spitzmu ¨ ller, 2006). The analysis of the language used by adolescents and pre-adolescents, then, has been of critical importance for the study of linguistic change (Sankoff, 2004; Macaulay, 2005; Cheshire, 2007; Jørgensen, 2009; Tagliamonte and D’Arcy, 2009; Tagliamonte and Denis, 2010). Features typical of the language used by teenagers are not only found in Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2452–2470 ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 28 February 2010 Received in revised form 2 February 2011 Accepted 20 February 2011 Available online 7 April 2011 Keywords: General extenders Pragmatic functions Teenagers’ language Vague language Grammaticalization ABSTRACT The language of teenagers is of particular interest to linguists, in that adolescents and young people introduce important innovations and changes into language use, as compared to the stability typical of adult language. This paper is concerned with the analysis of the spoken language of British teenagers, taken from the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), and looks specifically at a group of English expressions, referred in the literature under different names, ‘general extenders’ being one of the most common of these in recent years. Data collected from the corpus is contrasted with a comparable sample of the language of adults taken from the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE). Particular attention is paid to three expressions, and stuff, and everything and and things, since of all general extenders these show the most distinctive features in terms of use and frequency when teenage talk and adult speech are compared. Findings indicate, firstly, that general extenders are, as expected, more typical of speech than of writing; secondly, that they are, contrary to the initial hypothesis, generally more common in adults than in teenage language, although some do occur more frequently in the language of teenagers; thirdly, that their use seems to have increased in recent times; fourthly, that the three general extenders present some features typical of grammaticalization; and finally, that no typical pragmatic function of these is associated with the language of teenagers, although and stuff and and everything often lose their original set-marking condition in teenage production, that is, their habitual function of classifying an item as a member of a particular class or category, and are used instead as markers of group and social identity. ß 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. § This corresponds to an example taken from the COLT corpus, document code number B132101/226. * Tel.: +34 981563100x11890/11983; fax: +34 981574646. E-mail address: ignacio.palacios@usc.es. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2011.02.011