Refine
Year of publication
- 2006 (3) (remove)
Document Type
- Part of a Book (3) (remove)
Language
- German (3)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Keywords
- Konversationsanalyse (3) (remove)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (3) (remove)
Reviewstate
Publisher
- Lang (1)
- Stauffenburg (1)
- Verlag für Gesprächsforschung (1)
Using instances of conversations of among German adolescents, this paper aims at an empirical, conversation analytic reconstruction of interactional procedures by which participants accomplish locally relevant meanings of words. Object of the study is the evaluative adjective assi, which is a common item of German adolescents' slang. Evaluative adjectives are said to be either polysemous or underspecified in meaning. The paper shows how interactionalists accomplish local meanings of the item by using it in certain sequential environments (story prefaces, comments and conclusions) which are related to genres of moral entertainment (e.g. gossip, fictitious stories). Locally relevant features of word-meaning (such as affective meaning, lexical opposition, exclusion of semantic features) are specified in more detail by interactionalists as they use specialized practices (such as expressive enactments, contrasting, blocking implications) which are realized by specific linguistic means (such as paraverbal strategies, negation, disjunctive connectives).
In youth research as well as in research in old age, there has been a tendency to examine each generation separately - an approach that tries to comprehend youth and old age within their respective boundaries, as isolated entities. However, by neglecting the interrelations between the different generations, several key aspects that are crucial to the formation of their respective identity remain elusive. Given a model of three generations - of youth, middle generation and old age -, both youth and old age share a common social dependency on the middle generation in many respects. Moreover, those generations are dominated by the middle one and only take a marginal position in comparison. The relation between the surrounding generations and the ‘middle’ generation (for which there is no proper term actually) could be described best as “not yet” or “not any more”. These circumstances certainly have an impact on the formation of individual identity within the generations of youth and old age: the process of evaluating the norms, values, models and ideals of the middle generation (which are central to and preferred by society) plays a substantial role in the development of identity. The course of this process and its outcome are often similar with both the young and the elderly people, whilst there are also clear differences. In my contribution, I would like to outline the ramifications of this social dependence with regard to the impact it has on the formation of identity in the generation of the elderly people. Similarly, I intend to give impetus to a reflection on the forms of interdependence between the young and the middle generation as well as between the young and the elderly. Also, I would like to discuss the effects these interrelations have on young people’s identity.