Cultural terms for communication events among some American high school adolescents

Abstract

Through ethnographic interviewing, participant observation, and cluster analysis of perceptual judgment data, this study examines the natural language descriptions employed by some American high school adolescents in talking about the kinds of communication events they experience in everyday life and the underlying semantic dimensions by which these adolescents perceptually organize this domain. Adolescents described communication events through use of setting, participant, speech act, and purpose marker terms. Nine basic clusters of communication events were differentiated along five underlying semantic dimensions.