English World-Wide - Volume 27, Issue 1, 2006

The presence of words of Maori origin in contemporary New Zealand English is regularly commented upon both by linguists and in the popular press. Such commentary is, however, generally based on intuition and observation rather than empirical analysis. This paper begins with a review of published comment from the late nineteenth century to the present on the Maori presence in the New Zealand English lexicon, and then introduces a corpus-based study of that presence from 1850 to 2000. The corpus produced was the largest yet assembled for the study of New Zealand English. Findings confirmed diachronic changes in the number of Maori word tokens and types used, in the nature of Maori words used, and claims that Maori loanwords have entered New Zealand English in two distinct waves. Reasons for these changes include demographic shifts, revitalisation of the Maori language, political and social changes, and changes in attitudes among English-speakers.

One of the major characteristics of English in non-native settings is that it exists alongside indigenous languages and most people who study English here come to the language classroom with knowledge of at least an L1. Because the rhetorical structure of the L1 of these learners is not the same as that of English, what is written in these settings often exhibits features that do not meet the expectation of a typical western mind. This study analyses the structural configuration and some syntactic features that characterise students’ essays in a formal academic situation in Cameroon. The corpus is composed of 104 essays written by two batches of students (2002/2003, 2003/2004 academic years) in the department of English of the Ecole Normale Supérieure Yaoundé. Findings reveal that the structure of most essays examined does not follow the strict logical sequence that is characteristic of the typical English essay. And this may well reflect the narrative style that is foreign to the English native speaker. Again, there is a general tendency of register “mixing” in most of the essays. The article concludes that expository writing in Cameroon may well constitute a fruitful area of research into aspects of “nativization” of cohesion and rhetorical strategies of English in the “Outer Circle”.

This small-scale study focuses on variation in the relative marker paradigm in the vernacular of a group of preadolescents recorded in the Greater London area. The distributional and multivariate analyses of variation in relative marker usage in restrictive relative clauses reveal that the wh-forms who and what are well-established in the relative marker paradigm of the preadolescents. Who and what are shown to be sensitive to the animacy of their antecedent heads: Who is strongly favoured by human antecedents, whereas what is preferred with non-human antecedents. The numerically dominant relativizer that is shown to be strongly conditioned by the grammatical function of the relative marker as well as being favoured by indefinite and inanimate antecedent heads. The zero variant is similarly sensitive to syntactic function, and is preferentially selected in non-subject position. Furthermore, the selection of zero relatives is found to be highly constrained by clause length. Cross-variety comparison of the results with previous research on other English dialects suggests that not only are there nuanced differences in the choice of relative marker, but that there are possibly construction-specific differences constraining the choice of specific variants.

Johnston (1997) suggests that, if defined in terms of phonology, Scots as a traditional dialect in Britain has a “rosy future”. Glaswegian is known to continue Scots L‑vocalization in words such as ball and all. L‑vocalization of a different type, similar to that found in Cockney, is one feature which has been observed to be diffusing rapidly across accents of English. This paper considers the evidence for these two distinct processes of L‑vocalization in Glaswegian, drawing on empirical evidence from two corpora of Glaswegian collected in the early 1980s and late 1990s. The results from the later corpus confirm the vigorous maintenance of the Scots l‑vocalization, but at the same time provide clear indications of the incorporation of innovative L‑vocalization. Our findings confirm that at the phonological level at least, the Urban Scots of Glaswegian youngsters is both conservative and innovative.