A Comparative Analysis of the Discourses of Adolescents and Adults at Kombolcha Town, South Wollo
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Date
2016-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Key Words
adolescent , adult, age, age grading, communicative behaviors , discourse feature, gender,
language change, natural language, religion, socioeconomic status, variant, variation
Language variation due to age is a normal phenomenon but is not universally regular because the
factors that cause the variation do not have a regular impact in all situations. Their level of
impact varies from place to place, from language to language, and from culture to culture.
Though many variationist studies were conducted so far, variation within the Amharic discourse
is not addressed. This research embarks to compare the discourses of Amharic speaking
adolescents and adults and reveal the impact level of other three social factors such as gender,
socioeconomic grouping and religion on the differrences. It also tries to give insight about the
differences between the age groups in their communicative behaviors as it is implied by the
differences in their discourses. The researcher derived the data from tape-recorded natural
conversations of twenty-seven adolescents and twenty-seven adults, fifty-four in total. An
interview was also conducted with the participants to substantiate the conversational data and to
find some facts that lie behind the preference differences between the specified age groups.
At the end it was found out that the differences between the two age groups exceed their
similarities. This leads to a conclusion that there is age-caused difference between the discourses
of adolescents and adults.
With regard to the impact of the three social factors, males, the lower socioeconomic group and
Christians are more active in causing differences though their level of influence varies. In their
power to predict the differences between the adolescents and the adults in their use of the
discourse features, gender and socioeconomic grouping are at the top and religion is in a second
place.
The study on the diversification of the uses and variants of discourse features also indicates that
adolescents lead adults.
Description
Keywords
adolescent, adult, age, age grading, communicative behaviors, discourse feature, gender, language change, natural language