Anna-Brita Stenström �anəˌbrit̬ə'st̬ɨnstɹɪm(1932 – 22 December 2023) was a Swedish linguist whose areas of research included

corpus linguistics Corpus linguistics is an empirical method for the study of language by way of a text corpus (plural ''corpora''). Corpora are balanced, often stratified collections of authentic, "real world", text of speech or writing that aim to represent a giv ...

sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language changes between distinct social groups, as well as how it varies unde ...

pragmatics In linguistics and the philosophy of language, pragmatics is the study of how Context (linguistics), context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship ...

, and

discourse analysis Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is an approach to the analysis of written, spoken, or sign language, including any significant semiotic event. The objects of discourse analysis (discourse, writing, conversation, communicative sy ...

. She initiated and co-directed three online corpora of adolescent language: The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), Ungdomsspråk och språkkontakt i Norden (UNO), and Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente (COLA).

Biography

Stenström was professor emerita of English Linguistics at the

University of Bergen The University of Bergen () is a public university, public research university in Bergen, Norway. As of 2021, the university had over 4,000 employees and 19,000 students. It was established by an act of parliament in 1946 consolidating several sci ...

, Norway. She also was a foreign member of the

Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (, DNVA) is a learned society based in Oslo, Norway. Its purpose is to support the advancement of science and scholarship in Norway. History The Royal Frederick University in Christiania was establis ...

. She died on 22 December 2023.

Research

Stenström's researched focused primarily on corpora studies, particularly regarding the speech of young people. Between 1984 and 2023, she published more than 20 books and articles. In 1996, she published ''An Introduction to Spoken Interaction,'' which places an emphasis on conversation through multiple means as well as describes and analyzes conversations. Using the London-Lund Corpus of English Conversation, Stenstrom shows the many conversation strategies with real world examples. In 2002, she published ''Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus compilation, analysis, and findings.'' The book provides an in-depth look at the Corpus of London Teenage Language, or COLT, and its conclusions on current slang. In 2006, she published "Taboo words in teenage talk," which utilized two separate spontaneous conversation corpora out of London and Madrid. It compared the spoken language of teenage conversation out of the two cities, concluding that, while London teenagers had a higher frequency of taboo word usage, Madrid teenagers had a higher frequency of sexual word usage. In 2008, she published "A matter of politeness? A contrastive study of phatic talk in teenage conversation," using Leech's Phatic Maxis.im to discuss

phatic expression In linguistics, a phatic expression (, ) is a communication which primarily serves to establish or maintain social relationships. In other words, phatic expressions have mostly socio-Pragmatics, pragmatic rather than Semantics, semantic functions. ...

s in Spanish and English youth as a form of politeness. The difference between Spanish and English teenagers is that Spanish teenagers use

vocatives In linguistics, a vocative or vocative expression is a phrase used to identify the addressee of an utterance. The underlined phrases in each of the following English sentences are examples of vocatives: , your table is ready. I'm afraid, , that ...

while English teenager give minimal feedback signals. In 2009, she published "Pragmatic markers in contrast: Spanish pues nada and English anyway," comparing the usage of the two different pragmatic markers and how they function. In 2014, she published "Your mum! "Teenagers’ swearing by mother in English, Spanish and Norwegian" from the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, comparing teenagers' usage of mother or mom in swearing. The corpora used were the COLT, COLAm, and UNO-Oslo. Spanish had the highest usage of these kinds of swearing as there is more stigma since Spain is a catholic country. In 2020, she wrote a chapter for the book ''Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts,'' "From yes to innit: Origin, development and general characteristics of pragmatic markers". She uses four different corpora (COLT, MLE, BNC Old, and BNC2014) to compare the pragmatic marker innit with yes, yeah and okay as well as show the development of the many markers. In 2023, she published "Corpus-pragmatic perspectives on the contemporary weakening of fuck: The case of teenage British English" focusing on the evolution of the word fuck with two different corpora of British English teenagers. It discusses how the usage is becoming more common and less stigmatized as the word is losing its more abusive meaning.

Other publications

* Stenström, Anna-Brita 1998. “From Sentence to Discourse”. In ''Discourse Markers: Descriptions and theory'', Jucker, Andreas H. and Yael Ziv (eds.) * Stenström, Anna-Brita. 2003. “It’s not that I really care about him personally you know”. In ''Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities,'' Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.) * Karin Aijmer and Anna-Brita Stenström, eds. 2004. ''Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora'' (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series) John Benjamins. * Anna-Brita Stenström and Annette Myre Jørgensen, eds. 2009. ''Youngspeak in a Multilingual Perspective'' (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series) John Benjamins.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Stenstrom, Anna-Brita 1932 births 2023 deaths Linguists from Sweden Corpus linguists Women linguists Academic staff of the University of Bergen Members of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters