Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

Kielellinen vaihtelu alakoululaisten teksteissä : Yleis- ja puhekieliset rekisterit oppilaiden kirjoittamissa viesteissä: Linguistic variation in texts of elementary school students

by Lempi Haapala

The thesis examines the linguistic variation in written messages by 6th graders, i.e., va-riation in registers. The variation was categorized into two different registers: standard lan-guage and colloquial language. The data was collected from a school in the capital region. There were 17 participants in the study. The analysis was conducted through linguistic text analysis. The 6th graders were asked to write two messages, one addressed to a teacher and the other one to a good school friend. The messages were required to fit into one page. The students wrote the texts using word processing software with the spell-check feature turned off. The students were also asked separately information about their gender and their course in the Finnish language. In the analysis, I used a table of colloquial language with morphological and lexical features, that was originally provided by Mia Halonen (2009), which I supplemented as the analysis progressed. The final table includes 19 colloquial language morphological and lexical fea-tures. The hypothesis of the research was that messages to different recipients would show lin-guistic variation. In the analysis of written texts, in addition to standard language, colloqui-al language variants were also found. Concerning the use of registers, I divided the data into two categories: 1. messages that were more standard for the teacher and more colloquial for the school friend and 2. more standard messages for both the teacher and the school friend. The first category includes 5 pairs of texts, and the remaining 12 pairs of texts belong to the second category. In the first category, colloquial language register was used frequently in the message to the school friend. In addition to colloquial language morphological features in general, I ana-lyzed possessive suffixes, slang and colloquial vocabulary, planning expressions, variations in greetings, and variations in personal pronouns. In the second category, only a few ele-ments of colloquial language register appeared, and I specifically analyzed variations in greetings.