Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Page 159

housing market. The housing market in Reykjavík is appalling now but it
was already in bad shape in 2014 when I conducted the study. So, my expla-
nation for the more negative attitudes of the youngest age group that corre-
lated with the informants holding a BA/BS degree was that this group could
not afford to be liberal toward the informal request since they were likely
competing in the housing market. The oldest age group, on the other hand,
which was also proportionally best represented in the cohort holding an
MA/MS degree, was probably already well established and could therefore
allow themselves to be more liberal toward the informal guise. But none of
this changes the overall result that all age groups were more negative toward
the informal guise than to the formal one. The differences that I just
described as an example were not statistically relevant.

When you address the results of the matched-guise test, you mention that the
choice of genre is problematic, since the rental market calls for formal language.
You mention that a different genre might have given different results. My last
question on the matched-guise test is as follows:
If you would repeat the matched-guise test today, what kind of text would you
use and what kind of results would you expect to see?

Vanessa Isenmann:
In retrospect, I think the genre should have reflected the one studied in the
online data analysis. Therefore, repeating the matched-guise test today, I
would use a more informal context for the study. But I had to conduct the
Dulin viðhorf study the way I did to come to this conclusion. So, it did pro-
duce a valuable result for my overall project. Also, since I did not conduct
the study with an informal context, I cannot make any definite statements
about what kind of results a study like this would produce. But I would love
to find out. That is a great idea for another study.

4. The Facebook data used in the quantitative and qualitative studies
I now move on toward the studies that are based on authentic Facebook posts on
the informants timelines. First, I have a few questions regarding the data, and I
am mostly thinking about the composition of the group in the context of the
quantitative analysis.
You describe in the thesis, that the informants that provided the linguistic
data were recruited through a snowball system on Facebook, through your own
personal profile page and different Facebook groups (p. 71). The informants are
born between 1946 and 1990, which means that the oldest informant is 76 years
old today and the youngest 32. The gender is distributed unevenly: 24 of your
Comments and discussion points from the first opponent 159