ABSTRACT
The main aim of the Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT) project was to make a reasonably large corpus of English teenage talk available for research. COLT was compiled in the late spring of 1993 and consists of just under half a million words of spontaneous conversations between 13-to 17-year-old boys and girls from different parts of London and with varying socioeconomic backgrounds, ranging from lower-working to upper-middle class. Most chats are said to be "focused on a particular topic of interest/' which implies that the borderline between a chat and a discussion in the traditional sense has suddenly become fuzzy. The discussion sections of the talk in Coates's material were found to be more complex than the rest, and this is also where epistemic modal forms were most commonly used as facilitating devices. Finally, the relative seriousness of the discussion compared to the chat is reflected in the complete lack of laughter.
