Diskurspartiklar hos ungdomar i mångspråkiga miljöer i Malmö

Sammanfattning: The thesis investigates the use of the discourse particles duvet (you know), ju (as you know), ba(ra) (just), liksom (like), and typ (sort of) among adolescents in contemporary multilingual settings in Malmö. The data is drawn from a corpus of 6 hours’ spontaneous group conversations between female participants. The conversations were audiotaped at two upper secondary schools during the semesters of 2002–2003 and 2003–2004. One of the groups consists of six informants who are all non-native speakers of Swedish. In a linguistic perception test they have been classified as speakers of a specific variety, Rosengård Swedish, by peer listeners. The other group also consists of six female informants who are all native speakers of Swedish. The same test shows that they are not speakers of Rosengård Swedish. The aims of the thesis are to describe the functions and meanings of the discourse particles and to compare the use of them between the two groups. The discourse particles are analysed from syntactical, phonetic, semantic, and pragmatic points of view. The investigation has a quantitative as well as a qualitative direction. The analyses are eclectically anchored. The results show that the discourse particles are polyfunctional and polysemous. The participants in both groups apply a high-involvement conversational style. There are significant differences between the groups regarding the frequency of duvet, ju, and liksom.. There is also a difference between the groups concerning the insertion of the discourse particles in the syntactic structure. The differences between the groups can be the result of group solidarity, the conception of discourse particles vis-à-vis sentence adverbials, and also due to automatization of a specific syntactic structure.