The present doctoral thesis entitled 'Phraseological Competence of Slovenian Teenagers' addresses three major research questions: what is the phraseological competence of Slovenian teenagers; what can the use of phrasemes reveal about the emotional world of teenagers; and what are the differences or similarities in form, meaning and pragmatic use between the phrasemes in the reception and production of teenagers in teen magazines and on the social network Facebook compared to idioms presented in textbooks. The thesis is divided in two parts: a theoretical and an empirical part. The theoretical part comprises of 4 chapters. The first chapter presents phraseology as a branch of linguistics and phrasemes or phraseological units as the basic units of analysis in phraseology. The main characteristics of phrasemes are discussed in greater detail, namely multi-word structure, stability and idiomatic meaning. The first chapter concludes with a review of literature on phraseology within Slovene studies. In the second chapter, attention is devoted to the teenage period in youngsters and the most pertinent characteristics of this period. The reception and production of phrasemes was studied in the early teens, i.e. primary school pupils aged 11 to 15. At this age, children already have conscious knowledge of different linguistic varieties and their use. When addressing their peers, they usually resort to teen slang. A study conducted on 50 pages of text created by teenagers when communicating via Facebook, revealed that this contemporary form of communication through e-channels is producing distinct changes in language. Due to the desire to consistently imitate spoken language, the unawareness of rules and the speed of communication, teenagers intentionally and unintentionally infringe upon the norms of codified written language. Numerous deviations can be observed, e.g. absence of punctuation, excess of punctuation and letters, using lower case only (regardless of proper names or beginning of a sentence). Words in Slovene may also include letters which do not exist in the Slovenian alphabet. The use of abbreviations, emoticons and words from other languages is also very frequent. The third chapter delves into the understanding of phrasemes. According to the literature, these are memorised as one unit and not understood first in the literal sense of the words, but instead their phraseological meaning is supposed to be detected by the speakers straightaway. The fourth chapter focuses on the phraseological competence of teenagers. The term phraseological competence comprises recognition, understanding and use of phrasemes. The results of the study of authentic and non-proofread texts created by teenagers on Facebook show that teenagers indeed use phrasemes in their e-communication. 52 out of 100 11 phrasemes analysed were pragmatic phrasemes which confirms that pragmatic phraseology prevails in the written form. The idiosyncrasies of slang phraseology are divided into five categories: 1 Teenagers use phrasemes which comprise of foreign language elements or entire phrasemes in foreign languages, e.g. from the bottom of my heart, boli mene čošak. 2 Teenagers use phrasemes in which one or more elements are vulgar expressions, e.g. pička/pizda materna. 3 Teenagers often use phrasemes comprising of the verb to be (Sl. biti), e.g. biti skupaj, biti za. 4 They use neologistic phrasemes, e.g. biti v koga, dati komu konec. 5 What particularly stands out in the analysed texts are abbreviations of typical (regular) word strings, e.g. LP - lep pozdrav; OMG - oh my god. When these abbreviations are expanded it becomes clear that they represent pragmatic phrasemes. This is why a new term is introduced, namely abbreviated pragmatic phrasemes (in Slovenian kratkopisni pragmatični frazemi), which is only used for the abbreviations that expand into pragmatic phrasemes in spoken language. This might indicate a new area in phraseology research. The second part of the thesis is based on empirical research work during which three collections (corpora) of phrasemes comprising of 386 phraseological units were analysed and compared. The first corpus includes phrasemes found in teen magazines and was divided into two subcorpora: phrasemes used by authors (adults) in teen magazines - reception; and phrasemes used by teenagers in their contributions to teen magazines - production. The second corpus comprises of phrasemes used by teenagers on Facebook, while the third corpus consists of phrasemes found in textbooks on non-literary texts in the final three years of primary school. Among textbook phraseological units, no phraseme was found corresponding to the actual use of teenagers in their communication on Facebook. It appears that the teenage phraseological competence is not influenced by the knowledge on phraseology acquired through school curriculum. In the reference dictionary for Slovene SSKJ, 81% of the phrasemes analysed are listed as such and suitably tagged, while only 49% are listed in the Dictionary of Slovenian Phrasemes (the average does not include phrasemes in the form of sentences). Considering the relatively low percentage of phrasemes included in the specialised dictionary, the question arises as to why would one author decide to take on such a big project alone when there are other high quality phraseology experts in Slovenia who could share the workload and thus make the dictionary more representative? The phraseological units found in the corpora were then analysed in terms of form, meaning and pragmatic level. 15% of a total of 386 phrasemes were in the form of sentences and the rest as word strings. Among the latter, teenagers appear to receive and use particularly the 12 verbal phrasemes, followed by phrasemes with adverbs, particles and nouns. Teenagers appear to understand sentence phrasemes, but they do not use them themselves. This type of phrasemes was only found in the textbook corpus and the corpus of texts written by adults. In their own written production, teenagers appear to favour abbreviated pragmatic phrasemes. The analysis of similarities/correlations between phrasemes revealed that teenagers most often use phrasemes in which one of the elements is a reference to human body, i.e. somatic idioms. One third of all analysed phrasemes fall under this category. Moreover, teenagers not only understand such idioms (reception), but also use them (production), and the most frequent element is nerves (Sl. živci). One of the typical characteristics of teen language is the language of emotions, which is reflected also in the use of phrasemes. 37% of all phrasemes analysed (out of 49 used to convey emotions) were used to convey positive emotions, while 63% were used to convey negative emotions, most frequently anger. This could support the idea that the world of teenagers is flushed with negative emotions. At this point, the empirical part meets the theoretical part. During the teen years, youngsters often worry about their physical appearance and they may have difficulties in dealing with the expectations from the part of their parents, the school and society in general. Their feelings of powerlessness, anger and worthlessness are also expressed through phrasemes. The present doctoral dissertation concludes with a collection of "new" slang phraseological units which could represent a starting point for a dictionary of slang phrasemes.
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