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2024 Vol. 15 №4

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Rudneva E.A.

Solidarity strategies in adolescent communication

DOI
10.5922/2225-5346-2024-4-5
Pages
72-88
linguistic politeness solidarity strategies conversation analysis teasing ritual insults youth slang teenagers’ communication

Abstract

The study aims to reveal politeness strategies used in natural interaction within a particular community group. The article analyses excerpts from audio recordings of conversations of teenage male friends. The chosen interactional approach relies on Goffman’s notion of face and Brown and Levinson’s model of linguistic politeness, ethnographic methods of collecting data, and conversation analysis. The case study continues the discussion of gender and age aspects of politeness realization and communication styles. The article reveals the following interactional solidarity strategies: teasing and group jokes, where participants add details to exaggerate the comic effect; ritual insults, in particular making up nicknames; synchronized speech pacing, even leading to creating spontaneous poetry. In the case of a request, the following politeness strategies and means are noted: repetition of words, both literal and with variations; increasing the volume and varying the speech rate, which express the common emotional state; decreasing the imposition with lexical means, markers of in-group identity; friend’s supporting through an offer and a jokily threat, language game (rhyming and deliberate mispronouncing), politeness marker "please" and its slang equivalent “pazhe”, minimizing the degree of a favour; using markers of group identity (“brother”), offering help and threating jokingly, using puns (rhyme and deliberate change of the phonetic form of a word), and increasing volume and prosodic emphasis that express an emotional state. Participants experiment with communicative strategies, sometimes pushing the degree of their expression to the edge and turning it into a performance. Applying the solidarity strategies in a more expressive and playful way seems to be a feature of the adolescent communication style. The data analysed reveals the local, cultural (and supposedly age) specifics of employing the universal face-saving mechanism of the communication.

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